Geodiversity beyond Geoheritage

Geodiversity is generally defined as the natural range of abiotic (geological, geomorphological, pedological, and hydrological) features and processes. Geoheritage, anchored on geodiversity, is one way of recognizing the landscape’s value to humans. Geoheritage valuation includes recognizing scientific, educational, and touristic values of geodiversity elements to determine sites worth studying and preserving. Key texts in geodiversity and geoheritage research primarily recognize ‘ecosystem services’ as the practical benefits that humans get from the abiotic nature and the natural processes associated with their formation and modification. Recognizing these benefits that humans gain from the landscape provides a foundation for geoconservation. Through its ecosystem services, geodiversity is linked to heritage, education, tourism, and conservation which have been the primary lines of geoheritage research in recent years. Despite geodiversity being defined as a value-free term, it remains a subject that is mainly studied in the Earth Sciences and most geodiversity research progress to geoheritage valuation. Presented here are some ways the Geodiversity concept can be extended beyond Physical Sciences. 

Ecosystem services do not fully account for the complex relationship (beneficial and/or detrimental) humans can have with the landscape. Geoeducation programs in active volcano-tectonic areas, as well as sites of past disasters, highlight geohazards which also result from geodiversity. There have been multiple studies that relate geoheritage and geohazards, and there’s still a potential to establish or adopt a framework to formally integrate these fields. Disaster studies have long considered the environment as something that gives humans both “benefits” and “hazards”, with the perceived weights of each factoring in humans’ decisions in risk mitigation (i.e. evacuating, relocating, etc.). These ‘benefits’ can be thought of as geodiversity’s ecosystem services and the ‘hazards’ as geohazards associated with the geodiversity elements in an area (i.e. presence of active faults, volcanoes, unstable slopes, etc.). By adopting this framework, we recognize that geodiversity is not just ‘beneficial’ but could also be ‘hazardous’ to humans, both of these strengthen the importance of geodiversity and acknowledges the complexity of the role that the abiotic landscape play in the lives of humans. Beyond practical benefits represented by ecosystem services, humans also build relationships with geodiversity through place-making. The place attachment of humans to an area is essentially a non-quantifiable, yet equally important, value that humans give to the landscape. Integrating geodiversity with these theoretical frameworks from the social sciences allows a wider and deeper understanding of how geodiversity is valued and how it actively affects human populations. This understanding, in turn, will greatly help encourage bottom-up approaches in conservation and more meaningful integration of geoscience in local education and tourism efforts.