Charles Perrings

Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity

The most unique feature of Earth is the existence of life, and the most extraordinary feature of life is its diversity. Approximately 9 million types of plants, animals, protists and fungi inhabit the Earth. So, too, do 7 billion people. Two decades ago, at the first Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world’s nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth’s ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate. This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.

Science for managing ecosystem services: Beyond the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) introduced a new framework for analyzing social–ecological systems that has had wide influence in the policy and scientific communities. Studies after the MA are taking up new challenges in the basic science needed to assess, project, and manage flows of ecosystem services and effects on human well-being. Yet, our ability to draw general conclusions remains limited by focus on discipline-bound sectors of the full social–ecological system. At the same time, some polices and practices intended to improve ecosystem services and human well-being are based on untested assumptions and sparse information. The people who are affected and those who provide resources are increasingly asking for evidence that interventions improve ecosystem services and human well-being. New research is needed that considers the full ensemble of processes and feedbacks, for a range of biophysical and social systems, to better understand and manage the dynamics of the relationship between humans and the ecosystems on which they rely. Such research will expand the capacity to address fundamental questions about complex social–ecological systems while evaluating assumptions of policies and practices intended to advance human well-being through improved ecosystem services.

Economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment

Nat iona l and international economic policy has usually ignored the environment. In areas where the environment is beginning to impinge on policy, as in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it remains a tangential concern, and the presumption is often made that economic growth and economic liberalization (including the liberalization of intemational trade) are, in some sense, good for the environment. This notion has meant that economy-wide policy reforms designed to promote growth and liberalization have been encouraged with little regard to their environmental consequences, presumably on the assumption that these consequences would either take care of themselves or could be dealt with separately. In this article we discuss the relation between economic growth and environmental quality, and the link between economic activity and the carrying capacity and resilience of the environment (1).

Towards an ecological economics of sustainability

Abstract Persistent disagreement both as to the interpretation to be given to sustainability, and as to the relation between ecological and economic sustainability, has hindered the development of an ecological economics of sustainable resource use. This paper identifies the main concepts of sustainability deriving from the two disciplines in order to explore the difference implied by an ecological approach to the problem. It is argued that present economic and ecological approaches are largely disjoint, and that they address basically different phenomena. By combining the efficiency requirements of what is usually thought of as economic sustainability with the stability requirements of an ecological approach, it is shown that an intertemporally efficient allocation of resources that satisfies the conditions for constant levels of consumption is not necessary to assure ecological sustainability. Ecological sustainability requires that the allocation of economic resources should not result in the instability of the economy–environment system as a whole.

Economic Growth, Carrying Capacity, and the Environment

Nat iona l and international economic policy has usually ignored the environment. In areas where the environment is beginning to impinge on policy, as in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it remains a tangential concern, and the presumption is often made that economic growth and economic liberalization (including the liberalization of intemational trade) are, in some sense, good for the environment. This notion has meant that economy-wide policy reforms designed to promote growth and liberalization have been encouraged with little regard to their environmental consequences, presumably on the assumption that these consequences would either take care of themselves or could be dealt with separately. In this article we discuss the relation between economic growth and environmental quality, and the link between economic activity and the carrying capacity and resilience of the environment (1).

Principles for the Conservation of Wild Living Resources

We describe broadly applicable principles for the conservation of wild living resources and mechanisms for their implementation. These principles were engendered from three starting points. First, a set of principles for the conservation of wild living resources (Holt and Talbot 1978) required reexamination and updating. Second, those principles lacked mechanisms for implementation and consequently were not as effective as they might have been. Third, all conservation problems have scientific, economic, and social aspects, and although the mix may vary from problem to problem, all three aspects must be included in problem solving. We illustrate the derivation of, and amplify the meaning of, the principles, and discuss mechanisms for their implementation. The principles are: Principle I. Maintenance of healthy populations of wild living resources in perpetuity is inconsistent with unlimited growth of human consumption of and demand for those resources. Principle II. The goal of conservation should be to secure present and future options by maintaining biological diversity at genetic, species, population, and ecosystem levels; as a general rule neither the resource nor other components of the ecosystem should be perturbed beyond natural boundaries of variation. Principle III. Assessment of the possible ecological and sociological effects of resource use should precede both proposed use and proposed restriction or expansion of ongoing use of a resource. Principle IV. Regulation of the use of living resources must be based on understanding the structure and dynamics of the ecosystem of which the resource is a part and must take into account the ecological and sociological influences that directly and indirectly affect resource use. Principle V. The full range of knowledge and skills from the natural and social sciences must be brought to bear on conservation problems. Principle VI. Effective conservation requires understanding and taking account of the motives, interests, and values of all users and stakeholders, but not by simply averaging their positions. Principle VII. Effective conservation requires communication that is interactive, reciprocal, and continuous. Mechanisms for implementation of the principles are discussed.

Paying for ecosystem services - Promise and peril

Payment mechanisms designed without regard to the properties of the services they cover may be environmentally harmful. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that over the past 50 years, 60% of all ecosystem services (ES) had declined as a direct result of the growth of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, industries, and urban areas (1). This is not surprising: We get what we pay for. Markets exist for the products of agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry. But the benefits of watershed protection (2), habitat provision (3), pest and disease regulation (4), climatic regulation (5), and hazard protection (6) are largely unpriced. Because existing markets seldom reflect the full social cost of production, we have incorrect measures of the scarcity of some ES and no measures for the rest.

Resilience in natural and socioeconomic systems

We, as a society, find ourselves confronted with a spectrum of potentially catastrophic and irreversible environmental problems, for which conventional approaches will not suffice in providing solutions. These problems are characterized, above all, by their unpredictability. This means that surprise is to be expected, and that sudden qualitative shifts in dynamics present serious problems for management. In general, it is difficult to detect strong signals of change early enough to motivate effective solutions, or even to develop scientific consensus on a time scale rapid enough to allow effective solution. Furthermore, such signals, even when detected, are likely to be displaced in space or sector from the source, so that the motivation for action is small. Conventional market mechanisms thus will be inadequate to address these challenges.

The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Science-Policy Interface

Assessments must provide conditional predictions of the consequences of specific policy options, at well-defined spatial and temporal scales. In recognition of our inability to halt damaging ecosystem change (1–4), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was asked in December 2010 to convene a meeting “to determine modalities and institutional arrangements” of a new assessment body, akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to track causes and consequences of anthropogenic ecosystem change (5). The “blueprint” for this body, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), lies in recommendations of an intergovernmental conference held in the Republic of Korea in June 2010: the Busan outcome (6). But it is a blueprint for governance rather than science. Using the experience from past assessments of global biodiversity and ecosystem services change (1, 7, 8) and from the IPCC (9–11), we ask what the policy-oriented charges in the Busan outcome imply for the science of the assessment process.

Resilience and sustainable development

This special issue results from a call for papers to address the connection between resilience and sustainability, and stems from the fact that the ecological concept of resilience has been exercising an increasing influence on the economics of development. Resilience is interpreted in two different ways by ecologists: one capturing the speed of return to equilibrium following perturbation (Pimm, 1984), the other capturing the size of a disturbance needed to dislodge a system from its stability domain (Holling, 1973). The latter may be interpreted as the conditional probability that a system in one stability domain will flip into another stability domain given its current state and the disturbance regime (Perrings, 1998). The relevance of this concept for the problem of sustainable economic development has been recognized for at least fifteen years (Common and Perrings, 1992). Indeed, Levin et al. (1998) claimed that resilience is the preferred way to think about sustainability in social as well as natural systems, and a research network – the Resilience Alliance – has subsequently developed around the idea.