The monetary valuation of these services, demanded by many governments and international agencies, is often depicted as a necessary condition for the preservation of the natural capital that soils represent.
This focus on soil services is framed in the context of a general interest in ecosystem services that allegedly started in , and took off in earnest after Bayesian Belief Networks BBNs have the added advantage that they allow the effect of parameter uncertainties to be accounted for, whereas Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis MCDA methods easily accommodate deliberative approaches involving a variety of stakeholders. A prerequisite to progress in such public deliberations is that participants be very cognizant of the extreme relevance of soils to many aspects of their daily life.
It invests man's life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land. Karl Polanyi Polanyi, , p. Not a day goes by at the moment, it seems, without the publication of some book, one or more editorials, or a flurry of scholarly journal articles referring in one way or another to the many services that soils provide to human populations.
Many international organizations, like the UNEP, as well as governmental agencies in numerous countries, e. This interest in the services provided by soils is part of a much broader effort to integrate the whole of nature into economic activities.
Underlying this larger movement, at its onset in the late s and 50s, was the belief that environmental deterioration, e. From this perspective, a logical solution consisted of clearly identifying and ranking these services, estimating their values, and translating them into monetary amounts, which could ultimately be used by the financial sector to set up payment or compensation schemes Boeraeve et al.
