How to care for the environment
How to care for the environment
Saving water, unplugging the devices you are not using, and recycling are some examples that will help us to have a more responsible and eco-friendly way of life.
Ecosystem services
Nature's gift
The progress and survival of any society depends on nature and its valuable resources. The environment and its ecosystems contribute to the development of communities from the health, well-being, and economic point of view. How? By providing the necessary resources for human life, supplying us with raw materials or offering us cultural or leisure resources.
According to the definition used by the UN in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecosystem services are all those benefits that ecosystems provide to human beings to enable them to fulfill themselves in all aspects, and they can be obtained in the form of goods, services, or values. The preservation of ecosystem services is a priority on which human life depends.
In a world threatened by the effects of climate change and the loss of biodiversity, knowing in depth what ecosystem services are, what practical examples we find, or what benefits they provide can help us to give them their true value and work on their care and preservation.
What are ecosystem services?
Ecosystem services, also known as environmental services, are all those benefits that an ecosystem provides to society, and which influence the health, quality of life, and economic development of the people who make it up.
But in order to better understand what an ecosystem service is and what benefits it provides, it is essential to start by defining first two other fundamental and closely related concepts: ecosystem and natural capital.
An ecosystem is an ecological system that is made up of different living elements that interact with each other, with their environment, and with their non-living environment. While natural capital refers to the set of renewable and non-renewable resources of an ecosystem.
In the functioning of any ecosystem, the biodiversity of its living organisms is essential, in other words, the variety of living beings that inhabit it in harmony and balance. Changes in the biodiversity of an ecosystem can directly affect the provision of ecosystem services, which is why we must also be concerned and take care of its management and preservation in a sustainable manner, something we always keep in mind in our policies and our sustainability model at Repsol.
The 4 types of ecosystem services
According to the benefit or use they offer to the society to which they belong, the ecosystem services that exist around the world can be divided into four different types.
Sustainability at Repsol
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Examples of environmental services
Once the different types of environmental services have been described in detail, it is also useful to examine them more in depth by breaking down some examples, especially those related to regulation, since their effect is often invisible, and we focus on them when they have been altered or deteriorated:
How to care for the environment
Saving water, unplugging the devices you are not using, and recycling are some examples that will help us to have a more responsible and eco-friendly way of life.
What is natural capital?
Discover this set of renewable and non-renewable natural resources of an ecosystem that provide us with goods such as water, wood, and medicines and which we know as natural capital.