Ecosystem services, human well-being
and quality of life
Anna Frąckiewicz
annaefrackiewicz@gmail.com
Key words: Ecosystem services, human well-being, Human Development Index, Happy Planet
Index
Introduction
Well-being denotes how well people feel about their surrounding and these feelings can
be thought of as adding up to quality of life. There are many components of well-being
that include health, economic standards of living, social conditions and the physical
environment. Traditional measures of well-being have focused on health indicators like
life expectancy. Well-being may be also measured in economic terms e.g. standard of
living defined as the amount of money and access to goods and services that a person
has. Other measures of well-being might include, happiness, environmental health, and
development that are far harder to measure.
This paper gives overview on human well-being and quality of life as phenomena
dependant on and strongly connected with ecosystem services. The findings of
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment about different constituents of well-being will be
presented. Example indices concerning well-being will be briefly reported.
Definitions
According to the EPA ecosystem services are defined as the products of ecological
functions or processes that directly or indirectly contribute to human well-being, or have
the potential to do so in the future [6]. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA)
defines ecosystem services in an even simpler, very anthropogenic way, as the benefits
people derive from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food and
water; regulating services such as regulation of floods, drought, land degradation, and
disease; supporting services such as soil formation and nutrient cycling; and cultural
services such as recreational, spiritual, religious and other nonmaterial benefits [1].
[more info – Ecosystem goods and services ]
The well-being should be understood as “state of happiness, good health and/or
prosperity” whereas quality if life is the degree of well-being felt by an individual or
group of people. It consists of two components: physical and psychological. The
physical aspect includes such things as health, diet, and protection against pain and
disease. The psychological aspect includes stress, worry, pleasure and other positive or
negative emotional states[8]
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Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Findings
According to the findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment ecosystem services
are strongly interlinked with different constituents of human well-being.
There are several key components of human well-being:

the basic material needs for a good life,

health,

good social relations,

and personal security,

freedom of choice and action
The relationships are schematically shown in the figure below.
Fig. 1 Relationships among ecosystem services and human well-being.[1]
[more information - Ecosystem services and Millennium Assessment ]
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Dependence of constituents of well-being on ecosystem services
Basic material for good life refers to the ability to have a secure and adequate
livelihood, including income and assets, enough food and water at all times, shelter,
ability to have energy to keep warm and cool, and access to goods.
Access to basic material for a good life is strongly linked to both provisioning services
such as food and fiber production and regulating services, including water purification. It
is obvious that many of material factors (food, clear water, shelter, clothing) are
essential for human life. However access to these materials is often heavily mediated by
socioeconomic circumstances.
Healthy person is the one who is adequately nourished and free from disease, has
access to adequate and clean drinking water and clean air. Health is strongly connected
to both provisioning services such as food production and regulating services, including
those that influence the distribution of disease-transmitting insects and of irritants and
pathogens in water and air. Health can also be linked to cultural services since they
affect spiritual, inspirational, aesthetic, and recreational opportunities, and these in turn
affect both physical and emotional states of people.
The links between ecosystem change and human health are complex because they are
often indirect, differ in space and time, and are dependent on a number of varying
factors. The schematic presentation of relationships between human well-being and
ecosystem services is shown below.
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Fig.2 Interrelationship between ecosystem services, aspects of human well-being and human
health.[3]
Security is understood as a safety of persons and possessions, secure access to
necessary resources, and security from natural and human-made disasters. It is
affected both by changes in provisioning services, which affect supplies of food and
other goods and the likelihood of conflict over declining resources, and by changes in
regulating services, which could influence the frequency and magnitude of floods,
droughts and disease regulation, climate regulation. It can also be affected by changes
in cultural services since they can contribute to the strengthening or breakdown of social
networks within community.
Good social relations are thought as realization of aesthetic and recreational values,
ability to express cultural and spiritual values, development of social capital and
avoidance of tension and conflict over a declining resource base.
Social relations are affected by changes in provisioning and regulating ecosystem
services, basically through their more direct impacts on material well-being. Changes in
cultural services are also strongly influencing social relations, as they affect the quality
of human experience, particularly in cultures that have retained strong connections to
local environments.
Freedom of choice and action refer to the ability of individuals to control what
happens to them and to be able to achieve what they value doing or being. It cannot be
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actually achieved without the existence of the other components of well-being and thus
is influenced by changes in provisioning, regulating, or cultural services from
ecosystems.
Measurement of Human Well-Being
MA aims at identification of direct and indirect ways the change in ecosystem condition
can affect the human well-being positively or negatively. The problem is more
complicated if one starts to think how multidimensional well-being is and therefore how
hard it is to measure it. However, number of indices have been developed dealing with
assessing human well-being at different scales. Below example indices are described.
- Human Development Index (HDI)
The Human Development Index is a well known index supported by United Nations
General Assembly and widely used in policy assessments. It summarizes composite a
country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health,
knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Health is measured by life expectancy at
birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and the
combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living
by GDP per capita. It does not take into account cultural or social aspects of well-being,
and it considers security dimensions only insofar as they are reflected in economic and
health outcomes.[5]
[More info http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/indices/hdi/ ]
- Happy Planet Index (HPI)
The Happy Planet Index is a concept developed by the new economics foundation. It is
an index of human well-being and environmental impact. The HPI reflects the average
years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of
planetary resources consumed. It incorporates three separate indicators: ecological
footprint, life-satisfaction and life expectancy in following way:
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Below the global Happy Planet Index is presented.
Fig. 3 Map of world’s Happy Planet Index. [7]
[More information - www.happyplanetindex.org ]
- U.S. Well-Being Index
The Well-Being Index proposed by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is
developed as the part of Ecological Research Program Multi-year Plan for 2008-2014. It
is independent of time, place and culture and unifies the human and environmental
domain. This index will expand the interpretation of ecosystem services indicators into
an overall quality of life measurement which could be used in decision making
processes. The four sub-indexes have been recognized.

human needs sub-index

happiness sub-index

economics sub-index

environmental sub-index
Controversies
Ecosystem services are clearly necessary, but not sufficient for human well-being. If the
material minimum which is essential for human life is attained human well-being
becomes very subjective and experimental. Personal expectations, social position and
relationships as well as sense of participation and inclusion have relatively little to do
with ecosystem services directly. Proper provisioning services surely increase quality of
life in developing countries however the influence may not be so strong in developed
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countries. If one thinks how much quality of life and consequently well-being can be
improved due to governmental socioeconomic decisions a decoupling from ecosystem
services might be realized. Regarding non-material aspects of human well-being such
as good health, a sense of security, good social relations, freedom and choice of action,
they should not be confused with life free from all difficulty. Actually life of every human
being is subjected to some suffering and pain as well as feeling of anxiety and it does
not necessary mean poor human well-being.
“It does not necessarily follow that more ecosystem services mean more human wellbeing, or vice versa. It is, for instance, quite widely observed that general improvements
in well-being often occur despite, or because of, decreases in ecosystem services, at
least at the local scale.”[4] In fact, due to globalization of trade and modernization the
societies well-being becomes less dependent on ecosystem services provided by the
local environments.
Moreover it is plausible that the links between ecosystem services and human wellbeing are complex, diverse, context-dependent. The need to consider different spatial
and temporal scales makes the proper assessment even more complicated. All
available measures are dealing with the same problems, both conceptual (are they
measuring the right thing, in the right way?) and practical (how do we actually
implement them?). Moreover, most available measures are extremely difficult to
be related to ecosystem services.
Conclusions
The concept of human well-being is complex and multidimensional. The linkages
between human well-being and ecosystem services are even more complex. Even
though some of these links are recognized, many remain poorly understood and
controversial.
The capacity of human communities to form satisfied societies, stable economies, and
to plan for the future relies on environmental stability, availability of natural materials,
and the adequate functioning of the cleansing and recycling processes of ecosystems.
Human well-being has a two-way interaction with ecosystem condition, mediated in the
one direction through the services that ecosystems provide to people, and in the other
by the largely unintended impacts of human activities on ecosystem functioning [4].
Therefore human transformation of ecosystems and subsequently of services they
provide may add up to or reduce the benefits to society. The man-made change to
ecosystem may lead to ecosystem services lost, which in long term may exceed the
short term economic gains for society. Therefore an appropriate environmental
management which takes into account the importance of ecosystem service for quality
of life and human well-being should be involved in decision making processes.
References
[1] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Island
Press, Washington, DC.
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[2] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: A Framework for
Assessment. Island Press, Washington, DC.
[3] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Health Syntheis..
Island Press, Washington, DC.
[4] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Multiscale
Assessments. Findings of the Sub-Global Assessments Working Group. Island Press, Washington, DC.
[5]
Human Development Report 2007/2008, United Nations Development Programme
[6]
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Ecological Research Program Multi-year Plan for 2008-2014,
[7]
New economics foundation, Happy Planet Index Report 2006
[8] BUTLER C.D., OLUOCH-KOSURA W. 2006, Linking Future Ecosystem Services and Future Human
Well-being. Ecology and Society 11(1): 30.
[9]
www.wikipedia.org
Useful links:
www.millenniumassessment.org
www.ecosystemservicesproject.org
www.greenfacts.org
www.happyplanetindex.org
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