Demystifying ecosystem services
Food chains in ecosystems exist in the form of food pyramids. Although a food chain might not always be a linear chain of progression and can alternatively be called a food web. However, according to certain defining characteristics, certain levels of production and consumption can be differentiated in a food chain. These are called trophic levels, which can be defined as the feeding levels in a food chain or web in an ecological community.
Trophic Levels
The rest of the food chain or web consists of consumers who consume other organic life-forms for their energy needs. The second trophic level is represented by primary consumers, who are organisms that consume primary producers for their food and energy needs. Herbivores can be classified as secondary producers, representing the second trophic level in an ecosystem.
The third broad category among the trophic levels in a food chain is secondary consumers, which are organisms that consume primary consumers such as carnivores such as snakes that eat primary consumers such as mice.
The fourth and the last trophic level is the last broad category of tertiary consumers, which are organisms that consume secondary consumers for their food and energy needs. An example that proceeds from the previous example is that of hawks, which can eat snakes, which in turn is a carnivore that preys on primary consumers.
The chain of consumption can keep progressing, however, these are the necessary categories of consumption that forms the substrate for an analysis of trophic levels at most ecosystems.
Having separated the various trophic levels, it cannot be said that there is always a clear separation between the various trophic levels in a given ecosystem. Many consumers can feed at multiple trophic levels. A prime example is humans themselves, who can be primary consumers while consuming plants, secondary consumers while consuming mutton and tertiary consumers while consuming salmon.
Also certain primary producers can also act as consumers as well. An example is insectivorous plants that photosynthesize and at the same time consume certain organisms such as insects as food. Thus instead of food chains in linear progression, most ecosystems form food webs in the literal sense consisting of dense networks of consumption and differentiation of roles forming ecological communities.
Going from one trophic level to a higher one in terms of consumption, it is found that just 10 per cent of the energy possessed at one level is available for consumption at the next level of consumption. The remainder of the energy is either utilized by the metabolism of organisms or is released to the environment as heat or waste (D. Wilkin & J. Brainard, 2015).
Thus one can observe a decrease in energy resources available the higher up the chain of consumption one travels in a food chain in a linear manner, resulting in a lower amount of species diversity at the specialized higher levels of food chains in an ecosystem. However, the incredible amount of species diversity at the lower levels of the food chain can add to the confusion over the adequate categorization and in proving a sense of structure to ecosystems.
Ecosystems almost always consist of food webs that are interlinked and differentiated, leading to great biodiversity and the resulting complexity.
Ecological Communities
Although food webs can exist in great biodiversity and complexity, they also represent hierarchies and organization of species in an ecosystem. Ecosystems can overlap and interact, and as such there is no distinct and definite characterization of ecosystems based on the spatial configurations of interactions.
However, ecosystems can be characterized by an in-situ fluid equilibrium existing among ecological communities of organisms of different species. The equilibrium in general is maintained in ecosystems although temporal heterogeneity can lead to the fluctuation of various variables within ecosystems.
Ecosystem processes result from the life-processes of the organisms in their interactions with each other as well as with the abiotic environment. These processes however generate ecosystem services that can provide useful utilities to humans. Studies of ecosystem services can bypass structural and behavioural studies of organisms at the various trophic levels of an ecosystem and go forward towards analyzing the transition of energy and matter through an ecosystem.
However both sets of activities and processes are not mutually exclusive and aspects can overlap in investigations. The interactions in the various trophic levels involve the transfer of energy and matter, but their analysis also utilizes documentary aspects of structure and behaviour in ecosystems.
Understanding ecosystem services
Various functions of ecosystems are provided to the environment as the result of the interaction of organisms in various trophic levels in food webs. Some of them include provision of nutrients, decomposition, nitrogen cycling, contributions to the hydrological cycle, soil functions, maintenance of biological equilibrium, etc. These in turn offer beneficial ecosystem services to humans such as food, medicinal applications, water purification, crop reproduction, and many more.
In fact, it can be safely said that a huge part of resource collection in human economic activity is dependant on ecosystem services in some part or another. As such, it becomes necessary to preserve the equilibrium of ecosystems by preserving the food webs that constitute the organization of various trophic levels in an ecosystem.
This would ensure that the transfer of energy and matter occurs undisturbed in the embedded structures and complex behavioural characteristics of organisms. For this an intimate understanding of ecological communities is necessary.
All ecological services are possible due to ecological communities of organisms interacting in consort to provide certain results that form part of the natural equilibrium that is a self-sustaining framework. These ecological communities are composed of interactions that are made up of ecological niches that constitute certain clearly appreciable roles that certain species perform in its interaction with its ecosystem, and act as the unit for analysis of the interactions that species have in constituting ecological communities.
The interactions in terms of ecological niches can be symbiotic or competitive. However, both can feature in food webs and trophic levels and exhibit an immense variety that contributes to the overall biodiversity.
This biodiversity, due to the food web and its arrangement according to various trophic levels, occurs as functional differentiation in a hierarchical mode of organization. However, the dense network of species interaction makes these hierarchies less visible, and instead what is usually observed are communities of interacting species.
Ecological niche
Source: thwink.org
All hierarchies are ordered according to certain values that serve to provide access to participants whose concomitant roles contribute to their sequential differentiation. In ecosystems the dominant values according to which hierarchies are differentiated is the food web, and trophic levels and ecological niches offer an easy tool with which to form genealogical associations of roles in ecological hierarchies.
Ecological niches thus offer a model according to which adjustments that organisms make to community living can be analyzed. While trophic levels can provide a basis for an triggering mechanism for roles to be hierarchically ordered, the finer aspects of the ecological roles of species are defined by the ecological niches they occupy.
These roles in turn shape ecosystem services and offer principles to better understand the formative processes and the complex web of interactions that constitute the structures, behaviours and relationships that constitute ecological communities.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.