Colin T Reid and Walters Nsoh, The Privatisation of Biodiversity? New Approaches to Conservation Law

Pages324-325
Author
Date01 May 2018
Published date01 May 2018
DOI10.3366/elr.2018.0497

Biological diversity (biodiversity) is under threat – this we all know – under a seemingly relentless onslaught of climate change, population growth, urbanisation and waste. In recent years the related concept of “ecosystem services” has achieved wide currency, encompassing the services that nature provides in a developing, but fairly standard, classification. These services may be “provisioning”, e.g. food; “regulating”, e.g. water purification; or “cultural” e.g. amenity value. “Supporting” services such as photosynthesis, or the water cycle, underpin all of these and biodiversity can also be classed as a supporting service. Professor Reid is a well-known expert in biodiversity and nature conservation law and this book was an output of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2012 to 2014, on which Dr Nsoh was the researcher.

Ecosystem services is a natural science concept, but one which has been of much interest to policy-makers, and to social scientists of various types. An ecosystem approach is found embedded in the policy guidance under the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the Rio Summit. Arguably, in the social sciences, ecosystem services...

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