Brendan Fisher

Global mapping of ecosystem services and conservation priorities

Global efforts to conserve biodiversity have the potential to deliver economic benefits to people (i.e., “ecosystem services”). However, regions for which conservation benefits both biodiversity and ecosystem services cannot be identified unless ecosystem services can be quantified and valued and their areas of production mapped. Here we review the theory, data, and analyses needed to produce such maps and find that data availability allows us to quantify imperfect global proxies for only four ecosystem services. Using this incomplete set as an illustration, we compare ecosystem service maps with the global distributions of conventional targets for biodiversity conservation. Our preliminary results show that regions selected to maximize biodiversity provide no more ecosystem services than regions chosen randomly. Furthermore, spatial concordance among different services, and between ecosystem services and established conservation priorities, varies widely. Despite this lack of general concordance, “win–win” areas—regions important for both ecosystem services and biodiversity—can be usefully identified, both among ecoregions and at finer scales within them. An ambitious interdisciplinary research effort is needed to move beyond these preliminary and illustrative analyses to fully assess synergies and trade-offs in conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services.

ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AND ECONOMIC THEORY: INTEGRATION FOR POLICY‐RELEVANT RESEARCH

It has become essential in policy and decision-making circles to think about the economic benefits (in addition to moral and scientific motivations) humans derive from well-functioning ecosystems. The concept of ecosystem services has been developed to address this link between ecosystems and human welfare. Since policy decisions are often evaluated through cost-benefit assessments, an economic analysis can help make ecosystem service research operational. In this paper we provide some simple economic analyses to discuss key concepts involved in formalizing ecosystem service research. These include the distinction between services and benefits, understanding the importance of marginal ecosystem changes, formalizing the idea of a safe minimum standard for ecosystem service provision, and discussing how to capture the public benefits of ecosystem services. We discuss how the integration of economic concepts and ecosystem services can provide policy and decision makers with a fuller spectrum of information for making conservation-conversion trade-offs. We include the results from a survey of the literature and a questionnaire of researchers regarding how ecosystem service research can be integrated into the policy process. We feel this discussion of economic concepts will be a practical aid for ecosystem service research to become more immediately policy relevant.

Integrating the ecological and economic dimensions in biodiversity and ecosystem service valuation

Linking biophysical aspects of ecosystems with human benefits through the notion of ecosystem services is essential to assess the trade-offs (ecological, socio-cultural, economic and monetary) involved in the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity in a clear and consistent manner. Any ecosystem assessment should be spatially and temporally explicit at scales meaningful for policy formation or interventions, inherently acknowledging that both ecological functioning and economic values are context, space and time specific. Any ecosystem assessment should first aim to determine the service delivery in biophysical terms, to provide solid ecological underpinning to the economic valuation or measurement with alternative metrics. Clearly delineating between functions, services and benefits is important to make ecosystem assessments more accessible to economic valuation, although no consensus has yet been reached on the classification. Ecosystem assessments should be set within the context of contrasting scenarios - recognising that both the values of ecosystem services and the costs of actions can be best measured as a function of changes between alternative options. In assessing trade-offs between alternative uses of ecosystems, the total bundle of ecosystem services provided by different conversion and management states should be included. Any valuation study should be fully aware of the „cost? side of the equation, as focus on benefits only ignores important societal costs like missed opportunities of alternative uses; this also allows for a more extensive range of societal values to be considered. Ecosystem assessments should integrate an analysis of risks and uncertainties, acknowledging the limitations of knowledge on the impacts of human actions on ecosystems and their services and on their importance to human well-being. In order to improve incentive structures and institutions, the different stakeholders - i.e. the beneficiaries of ecosystem services, those who are providing the services, those involved in or affected by the use, and the actors involved at different levels of decision-making - should be clearly identified, and decision making processes need to be transparent1. Integrating the Ecological and Economic Dimensions in Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Valuation 2. Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services 3. Measuring Biophysical Quantities and the Use of Indicators 4. The Socio-cultural Context of Ecosystem and Biodiversity Valuation 5. The Economics of Valuing Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity 6. Discounting, Ethics, and Options for Maintaining Biodiversity and Ecosystem Integrity 7. Lessons Learned and Linkages with National Policies Appendix 1: How the TEEB Framework Can be Applied: The Amazon Case Appendix 2: Matrix Tables for Wetland and Forest Ecosystems Appendix 3: Estimates of Monetary Values of Ecosystem ServicesAll ecosystems are shaped by people, directly or indirectly and all people, rich or poor, rural or urban, depend on the capacity of ecosystems to generate essential ecosystem services. In this sense, people and ecosystems are interdependent social-ecological systems. The ecosystem concept describes the interrelationships between living organisms (people included) and the non-living environment and provides a holistic approach to understanding the generation of services from an environment that both delivers benefits to and imposes costs on people. Variation in biological diversity relates to the operations of ecosystems in at least three ways: 1. increase in diversity often leads to an increase in productivity due to complementary traits among species for resource use, and productivity itself underpins many ecosystem services, 2. increased diversity leads to an increase in response diversity (range of traits related to how species within the same functional group respond to environmental drivers) resulting in less variability in functioning over time as environment changes, 3. idiosyncratic effects due to keystone species properties and unique trait-combinations which may result in a disproportional effect of losing one particular species compared to the effect of losing individual species at random. Ecosystems produce multiple services and these interact in complex ways, different services being interlinked, both negatively and positively. Delivery of many services will therefore vary in a correlated manner, but when an ecosystem is managed principally for the delivery of a single service (e.g. food production), other services are nearly always affected negatively. Ecosystems vary in their ability to buffer and adapt to both natural and anthropogenic changes as well as recover after changes (i.e. resilience). When subjected to severe change, ecosystems may cross thresholds and move into different and often less desirable ecological states or trajectories. A major challenge is how to design ecosystem management in ways that maintain resilience and avoids passing undesirable thresholds. There is clear evidence for a central role of biodiversity in the delivery of some – but not all - services, viewed individually. However, ecosystems need to be managed to deliver multiple services to sustain human well-being and also managed at the level of landscapes and seascapes in ways that avoid the passing of dangerous tipping-points. We can state with high certainty that maintaining functioning ecosystems capable of delivering multiple services requires a general approach to sustaining biodiversity, in the long-term also when a single service is the focus.For most resource allocation problems economists use a capital investment approach. Resources should be allocated to those investments yielding the highest rate of return, accounting for uncertainty, risk and the attitude of the investor toward risk. As illustrated in Figure 6.1, suppose an investor has a choice between letting a valuable tree grow at a rate of 5 per cent per year, or cutting the tree down, selling it and putting the money in the bank. Which decision is best depends on the rate of interest the bank pays. If the bank pays 6 per cent and the price of timber is constant the investor will earn more money by cutting the tree down and selling it, that is, by converting natural capital into financial capital. This simple example is a metaphor for the conversion of biodiversity and ecosystem services into other forms of capital. The shortcomings of this simple approach to valuing biodiversity and ecosystems include: (1) the irreversibility of biodiversity loss; (2) pure uncertainty as to the effects of such losses; (3) the difference between private investment decisions and the responsibilities of citizens of particular societies; (4) the implicit assumption.

Navjot's nightmare revisited: logging, agriculture, and biodiversity in Southeast Asia

In 2004, Navjot Sodhi and colleagues warned that logging and agricultural conversion of Southeast Asias forests were leading to a biodiversity disaster. We evaluate this prediction against subsequent research and conclude that most of the fauna of the region can persist in logged forests. Conversely, conversion of primary or logged forests to plantation crops, such as oil palm, causes tremendous biodiversity loss. This loss is exacerbated by increased fire frequency. Therefore, we conclude that preventing agricultural conversion of logged forests is essential to conserving the biodiversity of this region. Our analysis also suggests that, because Southeast Asian forests are tightly tied to global commodity markets, conservation payments commensurate with combined returns from logging and subsequent agricultural production may be required to secure long-term forest protection.

Predictable waves of sequential forest degradation and biodiversity loss spreading from an African city

Tropical forest degradation emits carbon at a rate of ~0.5 Pg·y−1, reduces biodiversity, and facilitates forest clearance. Understanding degradation drivers and patterns is therefore crucial to managing forests to mitigate climate change and reduce biodiversity loss. Putative patterns of degradation affecting forest stocks, carbon, and biodiversity have variously been described previously, but these have not been quantitatively assessed together or tested systematically. Economic theory predicts a systematic allocation of land to its highest use value in response to distance from centers of demand. We tested this theory to see if forest exploitation would expand through time and space as concentric waves, with each wave targeting lower value products. We used forest data along a transect from 10 to 220 km from Dar es Salaam (DES), Tanzania, collected at two points in time (1991 and 2005). Our predictions were confirmed: high-value logging expanded 9 km·y−1, and an inner wave of lower value charcoal production 2 km·y−1. This resource utilization is shown to reduce the public goods of carbon storage and species richness, which significantly increased with each kilometer from DES [carbon, 0.2 Mg·ha−1; 0.1 species per sample area (0.4 ha)]. Our study suggests that tropical forest degradation can be modeled and predicted, with its attendant loss of some public goods. In sub-Saharan Africa, an area experiencing the highest rate of urban migration worldwide, coupled with a high dependence on forest-based resources, predicting the spatiotemporal patterns of degradation can inform policies designed to extract resources without unsustainably reducing carbon storage and biodiversity.

Ecosystem Valuation: A Sequential Decision Support System and Quality Assessment Issues

Understanding the economic value of nature and the services it provides to humanity has become increasingly important for local, national, and global policy and decision making. It has become obvious that quantifying and integrating these services into decision making will be crucial for sustainable development. Problems arise in that it is difficult to obtain meaningful values for the goods and services that ecosystems provide and for which there is no formal market. A wide range of ecosystem services fall into this category. Additional problems arise when economic methods are applied inappropriately and when the importance of ecosystem maintenance for human welfare is underestimated. In this article we identify a place for monetary valuation within the pluralistic approach supported by ecological economics and assess progress to date in the application of environmental valuation to ecosystem service provision. We first review definitions of ecosystem services in order to make an operational link to valuation methods. We then discuss the spatially explicit nature of ecosystem services provision and benefits capture. We highlight the importance of valuing marginal changes and the role for macroscale valuation, nonlinearities in service benefits, and the significance of nonconvexities (threshold effects). We also review guidance on valuation studies quality assurance, and discuss the problems inherent in the methodology as exposed by the findings of behavioral economics, as well as with benefits transfer—the most common way valuation studies are applied in the policy process. We argue for a sequential decision support system that can lead to a more integrated and rigorous approach to environmental valuation and biophysical measurement of ecosystem services. This system itself then needs to be encompassed within a more comprehensive multicriteria assessment dialogue and process.

The high costs of conserving Southeast Asia's lowland rainforests

Mechanisms that mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions via forest conservation have been portrayed as a cost-effective approach that can also protect biodiversity and vital ecosystem services. However, the costs of conservation – including opportunity costs – are spatially heterogeneous across the globe. The lowland rainforests of Southeast Asia represent a unique nexus of large carbon stores, imperiled biodiversity, large stores of timber, and high potential for conversion to oil-palm plantations, making this region one where understanding the costs of conservation is critical. Previous studies have underestimated the gap between conservation costs and conversion benefits in Southeast Asia. Using detailed logging records, cost data, and species-specific timber auction prices from Borneo, we show that the profitability of logging, in combination with potential profits from subsequent conversion to palm-oil production, greatly exceeds foreseeable revenues from a global carbon market and other ecosystem-service ...

Burning Water: A Comparative Analysis of the Energy Return on Water Invested

While various energy-producing technologies have been analyzed to assess the amount of energy returned per unit of energy invested, this type of comprehensive and comparative approach has rarely been applied to other potentially limiting inputs such as water, land, and time. We assess the connection between water and energy production and conduct a comparative analysis for estimating the energy return on water invested (EROWI) for several renewable and non-renewable energy technologies using various Life Cycle Analyses. Our results suggest that the most water-efficient, fossil-based technologies have an EROWI one to two orders of magnitude greater than the most water-efficient biomass technologies, implying that the development of biomass energy technologies in scale sufficient to be a significant source of energy may produce or exacerbate water shortages around the globe and be limited by the availability of fresh water.

Measuring, modeling and mapping ecosystem services in the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania

In light of the significance that ecosystem service research is likely to play in linking conservation activities and human welfare, systematic approaches to measuring, modeling and mapping ecosystem services (and their value to society) are sorely needed. In this paper we outline one such approach, which we developed in order to understand the links between the functioning of the ecosystems of Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains and their impact on human welfare at local, regional and global scales. The essence of our approach is the creation of a series of maps created using field-based or remotely sourced data, data-driven models, and socio-economic scenarios coupled with rule-based assumptions. Here we describe the construction of this spatial information and how it can help to shed light on the complex relationships between ecological and social systems. There are obvious difficulties in operationalizing this approach, but by highlighting those which we have encountered in our own case-study work, we have also been able to suggest some routes to overcoming these impediments.

Selective-logging and oil palm: multitaxon impacts, biodiversity indicators, and trade-offs for conservation planning

Strong global demand for tropical timber and agricultural products has driven large-scale logging and subsequent conversion of tropical forests. Given that the majority of tropical landscapes have been or will likely be logged, the protection of biodiversity within tropical forests thus depends on whether species can persist in these economically exploited lands, and if species cannot persist, whether we can protect enough primary forest from logging and conversion. However, our knowledge of the impact of logging and conversion on biodiversity is limited to a few taxa, often sampled in different locations with complex land-use histories, hampering attempts to plan cost-effective conservation strategies and to draw conclusions across taxa. Spanning a land-use gradient of primary forest, once- and twice-logged forests, and oil palm plantations, we used traditional sampling and DNA metabarcoding to compile an extensive data set in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo for nine vertebrate and invertebrate taxa to quantify the biological impacts of logging and oil palm, develop cost-effective methods of protecting biodiversity, and examine whether there is congruence in response among taxa. Logged forests retained high species richness, including, on average, 70% of species found in primary forest. In contrast, conversion to oil palm dramatically reduces species richness, with significantly fewer primary-forest species than found on logged forest transects for seven taxa. Using a systematic conservation planning analysis, we show that efficient protection of primary-forest species is achieved with land portfolios that include a large proportion of logged-forest plots. Protecting logged forests is thus a cost-effective method of protecting an ecologically and taxonomically diverse range of species, particularly when conservation budgets are limited. Six indicator groups (birds, leaf-litter ants, beetles, aerial hymenopterans, flies, and true bugs) proved to be consistently good predictors of the response of the other taxa to logging and oil palm. Our results confidently establish the high conservation value of logged forests and the low value of oil palm. Cross-taxon congruence in responses to disturbance also suggests that the practice of focusing on key indicator taxa yields important information of general biodiversity in studies of logging and oil palm.