Nature's life support: Ecosystems provide life-supporting ecosystem services.
Four kinds of ecosystem service
- Ecosystem services are the benefits ecosystems give that keep life going, for people and all living things.
- Provisioning: goods such as food, fresh water, timber and medicines.
- Regulating: climate, floods, erosion, water purification, pollination, pests.
- Supporting: soil formation, nutrient cycling, photosynthesis, habitat.
- Cultural: recreation, tourism, beauty, spiritual value, education.
Remember it as: Things we take, things nature controls, things it builds, things we enjoy.
Real example: more than three out of four of the world's leading food crops, such as apples, coffee and cocoa, benefit from animals such as bees carrying pollen between flowers. This regulating service is free, and without it many harvests would shrink.
When the question says 'service': Many questions do not accept goods (timber, food sold) as a service, and some do not accept tourism. Give a regulating or supporting service, such as a carbon sink or holding soil.
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The guide names four services that support life. Learn each with what the ecosystem does.
The four services in the guide
- Water replenishment: soil and roots let rain soak in and refill groundwater and rivers.
- Flood and erosion protection: wetlands store flood water; roots hold soil; mangroves slow waves.
- Pollution mitigation: reed beds and streamside plants take up nitrates and phosphates.
- Carbon sequestration: plants absorb CO2 and store carbon in wood, soil, peat and mud.
- All four support all living things, including humans.
Real example: in 1998 huge floods on China's Yangtze River killed thousands of people. The loss of forest upstream, which had let rain run straight off the slopes, was blamed, so China banned logging in the upper Yangtze and began replanting to restore flood and erosion protection.
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Damage the ecosystem, lose the service: Human activity changes ecosystems, and with them the services everyone depends on.
How human activity affects services
- Deforestation: less carbon stored, more soil erosion, more floods, less rain soaking in, habitat lost.
- Paving and building: rain cannot soak in, so less groundwater and more flash floods.
- Draining wetlands: lost water filtering and flood storage.
- Intensive farming: monocultures, fertiliser runoff, pesticides that kill pollinators, eroded soil.
- Humans can also restore services: replant forests, rewild, plant cover crops and windbreaks.
Real example: read the chart: on natural ground, 25% of rain soaks deep into the ground; under a paved city only 5% does, and runoff rises from 10% to 55%. That is why cities flood after heavy rain and their groundwater refills slowly.
Link the land use to the service: Each mark needs both halves: the human activity (monoculture, paving, clearing) and the service it changes (pollination, flood control, carbon storage).
Climate change shifts the conditions ecosystems are adapted to, so the services they give change too.
Climate change and ecosystem services
- Warmer seas bleach corals: less coastal protection and fewer fish.
- Droughts and fires: forests store less carbon and may even release it.
- Melting glaciers: less meltwater for farms and cities in dry seasons.
- Rising seas and storms: salt water reaches farmland and wetlands; mangroves can drown.
- Some gains in cold places: longer growing seasons, but the overall effect is hard to predict and mostly negative.
Real example: the Great Barrier Reef suffered mass coral bleaching in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024. Dead coral breaks down, so the reef protects the coast less and shelters fewer fish.
For a 9-mark discussion: Name ecosystems in different parts of the world, give negative and positive impacts, and judge how likely the losses are.
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How this comes up: Paper 1, from the resource booklet: explain how one ecosystem's services protect another, one linked point per mark.
The Mau Forest in Kenya covers hills that feed the Mara River, which flows into Lake Victoria. Parts of the forest have been cleared for farms.
Explain how protecting the Mau Forest may help conserve the river and the lake.
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