Nature Matters - The importance of a healthy natural environment
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Protect local wildlife
We depend entirely on a healthy natural environment for our wealth and wellbeing. It is fundamental to our economy and social structures, our homes and neighbourhoods, our ability to create and construct things, and to our health and happiness. Human beings are part of the natural world; we are one species amongst millions and have evolved to be part of nature, not apart from it.
While millions of people regularly watch TV programmes about nature and wildlife, the membership of nature conservation organisations is growing but really needs more support to help wildlife for the future. Legislation intended to protect nature is becoming more abundant and a growing area of land (and more recently, sea) is being designated as having special protection. However wildlife and wild places have been declining in quantity and quality for decades and continue to do so. The high value that people often attach to nature on a personal, individual level, is rarely translated into public policy or the investment and spending decisions of government, organisations and private companies.
The Wildlife Trusts (TWTs) are working within communities across the UK to create Living Landscapes and to secure Living Seas – to make places that are rich in wildlife, bigger, better and more joined up. This will provide a long-term future for the natural communities of plants, animals and fungi with which we share these islands and their surrounding seas, and will increase the natural environment’s ability to provide value to people now and in future. We are working to help nature to recover – for its own good and for the good of the people who depend on it. We don’t just want to slow or halt the decline: we want to reverse it.
If we’re going to succeed in this, and these Living Landscapes and Living Seas are going to spread and last, then a far greater part of society will need to be inspired to take action for nature, and enabled to both feel and understand the full extent of how valuable nature is to us and our communities.
Nature matters simply because it does, but also because it brings people huge emotional value, it delivers a wide range of valuable goods and services that are of practical benefit to society, and much of the emotional and practical value that it generates has financial value which contributes to the economic performance of the UK. It is central to addressing many of the UK’s most pressing social and economic problems (such as declining mental health, increasing non-communicable diseases, declining social cohesion, increasing inequality, increasing flood risk, increasing urbanisation) and to maintaining the productivity and quality of life of a growing and aging population).
Ecosystem Services
We know that the natural environment provides us with a wide range of ‘ecosystem services’: all the things that people need and want that come from the natural world of which human beings are a part.
We receive provisioning services (food, fibre, energy, drinking water, building materials, natural medicine). We get regulating services (pollination, waste breakdown, regulation of flood, drought and local climate, control of pests, disease and pollution). And we get cultural services (meaningful places, access and recreation, tourism, creative inspiration and spiritual enrichment). At its foundations, there are several ‘supporting services’ that underpin and enable all the others: water and mineral cycling, energy flow, and ecological interactions such as food webs, species distribution, vegetation structure, soil and water. Not to mention other services that we are yet to discover.
The living part of the natural world – the wild plants, animals and fungi with which human beings share the Earth; the wildlife – is a vital part of the whole. All the other services depend on it.
Different people recognise the value of the many things that the natural world provides to us in different ways:
Some recognise that nature and wildlife have intrinsic value... They are valuable in their own right and we have a moral responsibility to look after them, irrespective of any benefit humans might get from them.
Many draw emotional value from nature and wildlife. Seeing it, or even just knowing it is there, makes us feel good. We enjoy it.
Unquestionably, nature provides goods and services to us that are of practical value to us and to the rest of society. Food production, flood control and improved physical and mental health and wellbeing all have practical, societal value.
And many (but certainly not all) aspects of nature, the goods and services that it provides, can be bought and sold. They have financial value.
A central part of Trust work is to open people’s hearts and minds to help them to understand and to enable people to make the right decisions and take the right action to reflect the whole range of value that nature provides to us.
One of the reasons why the full value of nature hasn’t been recognised effectively until now is that often those who recognise nature’s intrinsic value have refused to acknowledge that it can also have financial worth; or vice-versa. Or those who value nature for the tradable financial value it generates have failed to recognise that its financial value is dependent on its ability to generate emotional or societal value – its ability to generate emotional connections or to deliver useful goods and services.