Simulation Modelling in Quantifying Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Environmental Management

Sustainable management of environmental systems requires an adequate consideration of various ecological and socio-economic services provided by the ecosystems. It is well recognized that ecological systems generate a spectrum of diverse benefits that are vital to humankind. Valuing of these benefits is a crucial component of sustainable management. The problem, however, is that many of the ecological and social amenities are not currently incorporated into the decision-making process. From the perspective of economic theory, they reveal themselves as positive externalities and as such have no direct market price. Another fundamental issue is getting at the quantitative characteristics of the ecosystem services. Traditionally, publications on this matter note that simulation models of the phenomena in question have to be used for this purpose. In fact, a whole family of simulation models is required. Such models should represent the main components of an ecosystem, their interrelationships and linkages to the system's environment at the appropriate time and space scales. They should also model physical, chemical and biological processes pertaining to the ecosystem studied. It has to be taken into account that any planned activity will substantially affect the ecosystem's components and their ability to generate goods and services. It is therefore necessary to understand qualitatively and to measure quantitatively the changes, sometimes irreversible ones, which may occur in the ecosystems and their services under various management interventions and compare expected benefits with possible losses. This knowledge should be incorporated into the process of decision-making. This paper describes a modelling framework for the sustainable management of environmental systems (MFSM). As shown in Figure 1, the architecture of the MFSM is built on three main components: 1) simulation modelling block, 2) economic assessment block, and 3) management block. The modelling block includes models of natural dynamics (ND-models), anthropogenic dynamics (AD-models) of the environmental system being studied, and a module designed to estimate the quantitative characteristics of the ecosystem services (QS-models). The economic assessment block provides a valuation of ecosystem benefits (VS-module). The management block implements the tasks of optimal control (OC-module) and multi-objective optimization (MOO-module). The MFSM is a tool in support of sustainable environmental management. [GRAPHICS] .