Contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda
Contribution des services culturels à l'agenda des services écosystèmiques
Résumé
Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework.
L'article est centré sur les services écosystémiques culturels. Les services culturels (ex : esthétiques ou récréatifs) rendus par les écosystèmes font partie du cadre général des services écosystémiques, issu du Millenium Ecosystem Assessment en 2005. Or les services culturels sont souvent mal définis ou analysés. L’article propose une revue de littérature des méthodes de sciences humaines et sociales appliquées aux services culturels. L’article plaide pour une poursuite des recherches sur les services culturels, qui sont au carrefour des sciences écologiques et des sciences sociales.