ELEMENTOS FACILITADORES DO ENTENDIMENTO DAS INTERFACES ENTRE SISTEMAS NATURAIS E SOCIOECONÔMICOSc.

The multidimensional nature of challenges delivered by the increasing loss of natural capital imposes the need for innovative strategies to ensure a continuous and sustainable flow of human prosperity. Such strategies, however, will only be successful if they are based on a solid knowledge backbone on the determinants of human well-being and their interfaces with humanity's natural wealth. Due to the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of phenomena such as climate change, biodiversity loss and persistent poverty, what are the strategies available to facilitate the understanding of the dynamics interactions between natural and socioeconomic systems? On one hand, this paper advocates that the approach of ecosystem services can provide important analytical and conceptual contributions to build an interdisciplinary research agenda in which the interdependence between natural capital and human prosperity is explicitly recognized. This is because ecosystem services are known as the basic interface between natural capital and human welfare. On the other hand, it is argued that the mutual interactions between society and nature can be better understood by adopting some operational tools such as the ecological-economic modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]