雅思阅读

📖 Reading Passage

The concept of ecosystem services has gained significant traction in environmental policy over the past two decades. These services, which include provisioning resources like food and water, regulating processes such as climate and flood control, and cultural benefits like recreation, are often undervalued in economic markets. This undervaluation leads to their overexploitation and degradation. To address this, researchers have proposed various valuation methods, including contingent valuation and hedonic pricing. However, critics argue that assigning monetary values to nature can oversimplify its intrinsic worth and lead to commodification. A more integrated approach, combining ecological indicators with socio-economic assessments, is increasingly recommended to ensure sustainable management while acknowledging both tangible and intangible benefits of natural systems.