The natural world provides humanity with essential services routinely excluded from the business balance sheet. These include access to fresh water, oxygen, and biomaterials, and functions including flood and storm surge attenuation, water filtration, sequestration of carbon dioxide, the capture and breakdown of contaminants, disease regulation, climate control and more. By adopting an ecosystem services perspective, we can make more informed design and construction decisions and obtain a fuller cost account of the benefits provided by a healthy, functional environment. This session will introduce the fundamentals of ecosystem services and discuss how Living Buildings can work with and even restore degraded ecosystem services.

Next session:

This session will be available in early 2009.