Valuing Geodiversity in an 'Ecosystem Services' Context

The 'ecosystem services' approach is being used throughout the world to assess the value that society derives from the natural world. Many of these values have been difficult to describe and/or quantify, and this approach has therefore been adopted in an attempt to assess the qualitative and quantitative value of nature. Both the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005) and the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UKNEA 2011) classified these services into Regulating, Supporting, Provisioning and Cultural Services. But both the MA and the NEA only include services that involve ecosystem processes or functional interactions between the biotic and abiotic worlds. Consequently they exclude services that are purely abiotic, and therefore grossly underestimate the value of nature. This paper outlines the goods and services that society derives from the geodiversity of planet Earth. These may be termed 'abiotic ecosystem services' or 'geosystem services', but a more holistic term for all goods and services derived from the natural world would be 'natural services'.