Health and Wellness as Ecosystem Services

What can we get from a healthy ecosystem?

• A healthy ecosystem → consists of various organisms engages in complex sets of relationships with other living systems and it environment
• Through these interactions, the environment produces various benefits, aka Ecosystem Services
  • Provisioning - provides food, water, fuel, wood, etc.
  • Regulating - regulates climate, diseases, cleanliness, flood, and other hazard controls
  • Cultural or Aesthetic - spiritual, educational and recreational purposes
  • Supporting - includes nutrient cycling, producing, etc. 
  • Note: the first three directly benefit all living systems, including humans, while supporting services are needed to ensure that the first three services are sustained. 
• Ensuring the sustainability of ecosystem services are crucial to human health and well-being.
  • The ecosystem provides us with so many of our needs as human beings.
  • Forests provide food, oxygen, carbon sinks, livelihood, etc.
  • Wetlands ensure clean water, safeguarding against water-borne infectious organisms
  • Mangroves protect coastal areas from storm surges and provide habitat for marine animals.
  • The entire landscape produced by living systems also provides a place for recreation, meditation, aesthetic aspirations and cultural identity, which are all essential to psychological and mental well-being.

Why would drivers of change impact biodiversity and ecosystem services?

• Living systems are tightly connected to their physical and material environment. 
  • Living systems and abiotic systems depend on each other for survival.
• Thus, disturbances in living systems will affect the material world. Similarly, changes in the physical environment will also affect living systems.
  • Natural calamities (typhoons, earthquakes, etc.) can disrupt ecosystems, resulting in changersin adaptations and/or behavioral patterns of living organisms. 
• People are heavily reliant on the ecosystem. We get our food, water, clothing and other needs from living systems (trees in the forests, marine ecosystems, non-living things, etc.)
  • However, as man acquired the ability to utilize and manipulate the environment, both abiotic and biotic, for their own needs, there have been grave disturbances to the ecosystem and biosphere in general
  • This threatens the survival of the biosphere, as well as human health and well-being, and ultimately, survival. 

Ecosystem Services

1. Provisioning for Nutrition and Food Security 

• Healthy Ecosystems ensure proper provisioning services 

• Food, clean water, fuel, wood → are provisioning services that sustain organisms that make up the ecosystem

• Living systems get their food from other living systems, such as plants and animals

  • Food sources also vary in nutritional content, thus, a living system derives food nutrition by consuming food from various sources
  • Thus, a diverse ecosystem provides foot nutrition by delivering various choices essential for growth, good health, and well-being of various organisms. 
  • Clean water is also essential.
  • It is provided by a complex interaction of living systems and the ecosystem, as well as the hydrologic cycle. 
  • Water quality and quantity is influenced by the quantity and quality of vegetation and forests.
  • Loss of biodiversity can alter or disrupt these provisioning services, resulting in health effects

  2. Regulating Services that Impacts on Health 

• Healthy Ecosystems are able to regulate and control diseases, as well as contribute to wellness

• Regulating services → Ensures quality of air, water and soil. Controls diseases and risks, including environmental hazards.

  • For instance, a healthy ecosystem maintains the balance of species populations in an ecosystem, ensuring that overpopulation is avoided. 
  • Thus, Vectors are kept in their habitats. They are controlled through “dilution” or through predator-prey interactions.
  • It is also important for ecosystems to maintain its genetic diversity as it provides a larger gene pool.
  • Other regulation services include those that impact the physical environment
  • For instance, the presence of mangroves allows coastal areas to withstand flooding and storm surges from typhoons.
  • Wetlands and soil microbiomes ensure that waste produced by living systems are treated and contained so it does not contaminate communities and ecosystems
  • Human health is influenced by the health of the ecosystem, including the plants and animals that they interact with. The health of communities is largely defined by interactions between people and their environment.
  • Thus, a degraded ecosystem will be unable to mitigate the impacts of pollution, climate change, water scarcity and diseases, etc.
  • Nature has also provided plants and other natural sourced that can help heal ailments.
  • Ecosystems are sources of traditional medicine and raw materials for pharmacological research. 
    • Various natural products have already been developed as sources of medicine. These include antibiotics, therapeutics, etc. 
  • Plants produce secondary metabolites that attract or discourage herbivores, or provide relief for ailments.
  • Microbial diversity and a balanced ecosystem within the intestinal gut are essential for health maintenance.
  • There is a correlation between microbial diversity (brought about by dietary diversity) and improvement in health (reduction of allergies and other inflammatory diseases)

The Extinction of Keystone Species would result in the Possible Collapse of an Ecosystem

• Deforestation Consequences:

  • Loss of species that are highly specialized in microhabitats within the forests
  • Loss of other species dependent or interacting with other species that have become extinct (the knock-on effect)
  • The extinction of keystone species can have a greater impact on the survival of other species since many depend on them for food, habitat, etc. They are essential to maintaining the balance of an ecosystem. A domino effect resulting from the loss of keystone species will subsequently lead to the collapse of an ecosystem.
  • Loss of habitat of certain species
  • Rise in CO2 levels
  • Loss of biodiversity, resulting in a reduction in ecosystem services
  • Loss of chemical entities and genetic diversities that can cure ailments 

• Urbanization Consequences:

  • Increase in total carbon emission
  • Acceleration of technological change that requires new energy sources, which causes an increase in consumption of electricity
  • Emergence of the chemical industry
  • Massive urbanization and population explosion

  \n