UN ecosystem services: visually deconstructed

The Princes Foundation ‘Accounting for Sustainability’ project published an image that inverts the hierarchy of the relationship between the economy and ecology in a particularly unhelpful manner Here the global gross domestic product (GGDP) is illustrated as $63,000bn and the value provided by the Earth to the global economy is $50,800bn (Accounting for Sustainability, 2012). These numbers misrepresent reality. We will not have an economy without stable ecological system in which the economy is based and so it is illogical to value ecosystem services as less than total GGDP.