Ecosystem Restoration - Rationale

Rationale

There are many reasons to restore ecosystems. Some include:

• Restoring natural capital (i.e. goods and services)
• Mitigating climate change (e.g. through carbon sequestration)
• Helping threatened or endangered species
• Aesthetic reasons (Harris et al. 2006, Macdonald et al. 2002)
• Moral reasons: we have degraded, and in some cases destroyed, many ecosystems so it falls on us to ‘fix’ them.

There is also the dissenting opinion that ecosystem restoration is not a valuable use of our time. Reasons for this opinion can include:

• Restorations may not be economically feasible
• They don’t always work
• They may be expensive (money could be put to better uses)
• Ecosystems naturally change over time and may recover by themselves

The problem is that we cannot restore an ecosystem to exactly the same state it was in before we disturbed it. This is because, as Anthony Bradshaw claims, “ecosystems are not static, but in a state of dynamic equilibrium…. we aim moving target.”

Even though an ecosystem may not be in its original state, the functions of the ecosystem (especially ones that provide services to us) may be more valuable than its configuration (Bradshaw 1987). One reason to consider ecosystem restoration is to mitigate climate change through activities such as afforestation. Afforestation involves replanting forests, which remove carbon dioxide from the air. Carbon dioxide is a leading cause of global warming (Speth, 2005) and capturing it would help alleviate climate change.