Freshwater Ecosystem Services - Down the Plughole?

Anthropogenic activities are causing environmental change. With environmental change comes an alteration of the variety, magnitude and spatial range of freshwater ecosystem services, which our societies have come to rely upon in one way or another.

Agriculture has been a primary force in environmental change, and is also an industry that heavily relies on freshwater. One obvious example of how agriculture - and more specifically recent agricultural intensification - has damaged ecosystem services is eutrophication, with a loss of water quality, toxicity and diversity loss. There is a need to realise the damages to and loss of freshwater ecosystem services so that these trends can be curtailed. In their informative journal article, Walter Dodds and colleagues provide discussion around this concept, and attempt to quantify the human impact on freshwater ecosystem services through the development of a composite index.

Dodds et al. (2013) diagram of the calculation of the proportion of ecosystem services used and overall impact

I want to focus on the drivers of human freshwater impact that they selected. Both the intensity of agricultural land use modification and of agricultural production. I find this interesting, and actually not very surprising. What I have learned is that both land-use modification for agricultural purposes and production intensification increase freshwater demand as well as frequently damaging the surrounding environment (which, of course, includes local hydrological systems). So, these will be key drivers of human freshwater impact and thus the changes to freshwater ecosystem services we are observing. The thirst of agriculture is a real environmental issue, and without action detrimental environmental change in relation to freshwater systems is likely to continue.