Last week and international meeting of UN delegates gave the ‘green light’ to a global panel on ecosystem services and biodiversity.

The Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), expected to be formally endorsed in 2011, is likely to modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

One of the main roles of the IPBES will be to conduct peer reviews of scientific literature in order to provide governments with ‘gold standards’ reports, and to assess appropriate government responses.

The formation of the IPBES has been hailed as a “major breakthrough” by the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, Achim Steiner. It the culmination of work which began in Paris in 2006, following suggestions made in the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005.

Plans to set up the IPBES are set to be formally established by the 65th session of the UN General Assembly, which opens in September.

The Commission for Rural Communities is to propose today that upland farmers should recieve payments for the services their land provides.

Speaking on the Today programme, Dr Stuart Burgess emphasised the importance of upland regions, which are “[just] as important as lowland communities.” Uplands, he continued, provide 70% of the UK’s drinking water, store 200 million tonnes of carbon in peatlands, and are a source of enjoyment for the 40 million annual visitors to National Parks.

Dr Burgess conceded that such a scheme may eventually bring additional costs to the Government, but stressed that other streams of income may be available should be value of uplands be recognised. Possible source include the growing carbon market, or through the revision of the Common Agricultural Policy.

The full interview with Dr Burgess can be heard here.

A major UN report has warned that ongoing nature losses may push key ecosystems beyond “tipping points”, leading to drastic losses in biodiversity and accompanying ecosystem services.

The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) states that the poor will suffer the first and most severe impacts of change, but ultimately all societies and communities will suffer.

Such tipping points could include the rapid dieback of the Amazon forest, where deforestation, fire and climate change may interact to cause an ongoing cycle of forest loss and a shift to savanna-like vegetation. Whilst reductions in regional rainfall may only affect local agriculture, increased carbon emmisions will hit the global community.

The report continues to state that whilst ecosystem restoration will increasingly be needed, biodiversity and associated services of restored ecosystems remains below that of natural ecosystems, and some systems may be impossible to restore to the original states that economies or communities depended upon (as seen in the Grand Banks cod fishery). Preserving biodiversity and investing in resilient and diverse ecosystems may well present the best-value insurance policy yet devised.

Source: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2010) Global Biodiversity Outlook 3.
Montréal, 94 pages. (http://gbo3.cbd.int/media/2721/gbo_en_web.pdf).

Ecosystem services are one of the BES’s policy priorities. You can read more about our activity on the issue here – http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/policy/ecosystem_services.php

This month’s special edition of the journal Ecological Economics focuses on Payments for Environmental Services: Reconciling Theory and Practice. Of particular interest in this edition is an article reporting on a study which developed a framework for deciding when payments are a suitable tool for delivering ecosystem services.

Ecosystems provide vital services to humans, which are public goods, but private landowners often own the physical structures of ecosystems; so policies are needed to encourage landowners to provide the desired ecosystem services. The study identifies five types of policy tools for providing ecosystem services on private land: prescription (regulations), penalties (taxation), property rights (alteration to protect ecosystems), public information (used to change landowner behaviour) and payments for ecosystem services (PES), which compensate landowners who supply ecosystem services on their property.

The study focuses on PES, proposing a framework for deciding when payments are a suitable policy option for delivering ecosystem services; this framework takes into account the attributes of the ecosystem services provided by a particular area of land, including the concepts of rivalry, excludability and the extent of the distribution of the service.

The study also suggests that creating a ‘monopsony’ (a market with only one buyer) can provide an effective way of delivering ecosystem services, because it is relatively easy to calculate the willingness of a buyer to pay by measuring the benefit of the service to an organisation or individual’s well-being. For example, a hydroelectric company could pay upstream landowners to manage their land in order to reduce the amount of silt downstream. The authors also suggest that bundling of ecosystem services could be a useful approach for implementing PES for complex ecosystems which provide many services: the services can be bundled together and multiple sources of funding can be found to support them.

Source: Science for Environmental Policy Issue 193

Original Article: Kemkes, R.J., Farley, J., Koliba, C.J. (2009). Determining when payments are an effective policy approach to ecosystem service provision. Ecological Economics. Doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2009.11.032.

An event was held today at the Royal Society to launch the IUCN UK Peatland Programme, which aims to promote peatland restoration in the UK, through evidence gathering and providing advice for policy making and effective practice.

At the launch, the chair of the programme, Rob Stoneman from the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, explained that degraded peatlands are responsible for releasing at least 10% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, so conservation and restoration of peatlands could be instrumental in delivering international obligations on climate change. Indeed, peatland restoration is an element of the Copenhagen accord, but it is important to ensure that this voluntary commitment is realised through legislation. Peatland restoration also avoids loss of valuable services such as water storage and filtration, and supports biodiversity.

The UK is currently among the worst 20 of the world’s 175 peatland nations for carbon emissions, but Rob Stoneman emphasised that peatland restoration is very cheap in comparison to other strategies for carbon reduction, and given the large number of peatlands in the UK, this country could become a world leader in peatland restoration.

The practical output of the programme will be delivered through the Commission of Inquiry into Peatland Restoration, run by the IUCN as part of the peatland programme. Martin Howatt, chair of the Inquiry’s advisory committee, explained that this will involve a review of key issues relating to peatlands which will be used to produce a list of recommendations for action.

There are three upcoming conferences as part of the programme, focussed on stakeholder engagement, funding peatland restoration, and considering UK overseas territories.

The results of a meta-analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Essex show that a ‘dose’ of nature is good for your health and well-being. Professor Jules Pretty and Dr Jo Barton analysed ten studies conducted by the university over the past six years, involving over 1200 participants. They found that ‘green exercise’ improved self-esteem and mood irrespective of duration, intensity, location, gender, age and health status. The researchers therefore conclude that the environment provides an important, and often overlooked health service.

Physical inactivity results in roughly one in 25 deaths worldwide, linked as it is to obesity and as a risk factor in many chronic diseases. More than half of the world’s population now lives in urban settlements; contact with the environment is becoming rarer. The resuls outlined by the University of Essex suggest that access to local greenspace should be prioritised in the design of sustainable towns and cities, leading to both conservation and health benefits – and therefore benefits for the economy and society.

The researchers’ analysis showed that mood improvements were greatest in participants undertaking light and vigourous activity, suggesting that there is a health benefit from any short engagement in green space. The presence of water generated greater improvements in mood and self-esteem for all participants. The greatest change for self-esteem as a result of exposure to green exercise was in younger participants, with diminishing effects with age. The mentally ill showed one of the greatest improvements in self-esteem, suggesting significant value in encouraging this group to undertake green exercise.

The researchers acknowledge that more needs to be done to disentangle the relative contribution of exercise per se and green environments to the mood and self-esteem alterations demonstrated. Research is also necessary to assess the benefits of undertaking green exercise with other people (social capital) and the benefits of connections with animals. However they conclude that attention should be given to the use of green exercise as a therapeutic intervention on the basis of the evidence presented; that planners and architects should improve access to green space and that children should be given the opportunity to learn in outdoor settings. Shifts in urban design, transport policy, support for social care and parenting can help to embed physical activity as a necessary part of life, and ensure that the public are able to take advantage of the full suite of benefits provided by green space.

Pretty, J., Barton, J. What is the Best Dose of Nature and Green Exercise for Improving Mental Health? A Multi-Study Analysis. Environmental Science and Technology (March 2010).

The Natural Capital Initiative will be organising an event later this year focused on ‘ecosystem services and health’. Further details will be available on the NCI website in due course. To register your interest contact Policy@BritishEcologicalSociety.org.

A conference was held on Wednesday 24th March on the subject of Ecosystem Services, organised by the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management.

Prof. Bob Watson from Defra gave an opening presentation explaining how ecosystem services underpin sustainable development, and talked about the current emphasis on valuation of ecosystem services, using non-market values as well as market values. He identified the key challenge in this process as gaining the required understanding of natural science, since we already have the economic framework to be able to implement this process.

The overall impression from presentations by the other speakers at the conference was that although the ecosystem services approach can be successfully applied, valuation of ecosystems may not be practical or useful at the current time. A bottom-up participatory approach, which links land owners to beneficiaries of ecosystem services appeared to be an effective way of using the ecosystem services approach.

In particular, Peter Glaves from Northumbria University and Dave Egan from Sheffield Hallam University talked about a pilot project on “Valuing Ecosystem Services in the East of England”. They proposed a three level approach to evaluating ecosystem services, ranging from qualitative (identifying ecosystem services), then semi-quantitative, and finally fully qualitative. They concluded that the third level, involving valuation, is not practical at a local level at the moment, but the overall ecosystem services approach is useful when applied in a user-friendly and participatory way. In addition, Stewart Clarke from Natural England told us that pilot studies carried out through the “Delivering Nature’s Services” programme have shown that the ecosystem services approach can be practically implemented through building good relationships between land managers and beneficiaries of services.

A useful scenario demonstrating the potential risk of applying valuation mechanisms through the ecosystem services approach was mentioned by Diana Pound from Dialogue Matters. If an area of wetland filters nutrients from water, this ecosystem will be valued highly for the service it provides, but enrichment can be damaging to the natural habitat. If water treatment processes improve the quality of water input, the value of the wetland could become worthless because it would no longer be providing the service, but in fact the wetland would be in a better environmental condition.

The general consensus was that valuation of ecosystems could be a useful tool in the ecosystem services approach but it needs to be applied with care when there is sufficient scientific understanding to do so. In the meantime, the ecosystem services approach can be successfully used through managing relationships between service providers and beneficiaries.

A panel discussion was held yesterday evening at the Judge Business School in Cambridge, entitled ‘The price of extinction: what losing biodiversity costs’. The event was part of the Cambridge Science Festival, in collaboration with Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Science Magazine.

Tim Radford from The Guardian opened the discussion by highlighting the global scale of biodiversity loss: one eighth of birds, 13% of flowering plants and one quarter of mammals are currently at risk of extinction. The panel members were asked in turn to give their opinions on the most important issues for biodiversity conservation.

Dr Hazell Thompson from Birdlife International and Dr Ruth Swetnam from the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, were in agreement that a valuation system for biodiversity is required. Dr Thompson explained that biodiversity conservation often loses out because it is not practically valuable to the people who actually bear the cost of protecting biodiversity. For example, constructing mines in the rainforest in West Africa has a greater economic benefit for local people than protecting the rainforest. Dr Swetnam detailed the main physical resources that are provided by biodiversity, such as food, fuel and climate regulation, and concluded that if we don’t assign monetary value to biodiversity then the value will in effect be zero, and this will inevitably lead to biodiversity loss. In contrast, in the view of William Kendall from Green and Black’s, assigning value to biodiversity will not work in the world of business because business values immediate profits, so the benefits of biodiversity conservation are not considered because they are remote and poorly calculated. In his view, biodiversity conservation can only be incorporated into business through regulation, whether this is through external regulation such as government incentives, or self-regulation through customer pressure. Although valuation and regulation were presented in the debate as opposing views, perhaps they could go hand-in-hand: valuing biodiversity could be an important factor in implementing regulation.

Pamela Abbott, chair of Cambridge Conservation Forum, put forward the point that there could be huge benefits to human health of protecting biodiversity, which would reduce government spending on healthcare. For example, a 10% increase in local green space can increase life expectancy by five years. She brought the issue of biodiversity loss down to a local scale, using the catchphrase ‘Extinction begins at home’, and suggested that individuals can have a significant input into conserving biodiversity through making wildlife gardens.

Professor Bill Adams from the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, talked about the issue of how much biodiversity we actually need. He mentioned the recent paper published in Nature on Planetary Boundaries, in which Johan Röckstrom defined limits for the capacity of the planet to cope with anthropogenic changes, including biodiversity loss. Professor Adams suggested that the particular boundaries which are considered to be important by rich countries might differ from those which are important to poor countries, such as those supporting food production. This issue was also raised in the discussion afterwards, bringing up the fact that most of the initiatives for conservation of biodiversity come from the developed world, while most of the remaining biodiversity is in developing countries. Dr Ruth Swetnam put it plainly, saying that since the UK has already cut down most of its trees, we are not in a good position to tell the inhabitants of developing countries to keep their trees when they have families to feed. Perhaps biodiversity conservation will take a different angle if more people from developing countries become involved.

Habitat banking describes the trade in habitat or biodiversity ‘credits’, i.e. areas of land where environmental restoration has taken place that can be bought to compensate for unavoidable habitat destruction through development. This concept has been in practice in the form of wetland mitigation banks in America since the 1980s, and its use is spreading as a means for governments to reduce the biodiversity loss associated with economic growth and development.

A report launched today by the organisation Ecosystem Marketplace provides a summary of the existing schemes around the world, listing 39 such projects in operation and another 25 planned in various countries. It calculates a market of between $1.8 billion and $2.9 billion per year alone from the 20% of projects that provide figures, resulting in the additional conservation management or protection of 86,000 hectares of land per year. There is increasing interest within the EU and the UK of adopting a more formalised habitat banking system, and both the EC and Defra have recently published scoping reports (available here and here) on the subject.

Download “The State of Biodiversity Markets: Offset and Compensation Programs Worldwide” report.

The Natural Capital Initiative has published an article for comment on the ‘Future Countryside’ website. Future Countryside has been established by the Shadow Environment Secretary, Conservative MP Nick Herbert, to debate new ideas in environment policy.

In the article members of the Natural Capital Initiative, a partnership between the Society of Biology, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the British Ecological Society, discuss whether movements towards valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services represent a paradigm shift amongst policy-makers and within the scientific community. Yet, say the NCI, policy is running far ahead of the ability to put an accurate ‘price’ on nature. The article calls for an approach which integrates monetary and other approaches to valuation as a way forward which reflects the true worth of society’s natural capital.

Have your say on the points raised in the article on the Future Countryside website.