In brief, the ambition of the IPBES is to replicate the IPCC’s role in the climate debate in informing the sustainable use / conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. That’s appears to be an even more challenging goal that limiting green-house gas concentrations…

Establishing the IPBES is certainly a victory for biodiversity and conservation worldwide, with greater scientific input into decisions that affect biodiversity across the globe. Nevertheless, this victory will certainly come at a cost.

Two issues are worth considering:

Concerning this second issue, Morgan Robertson puts it nicely in his blog:

one person’s ecosystem services are another person’s conditions of biological existence, and to have them continuously monitored, valued and recorded is… unsettling. At the very least — regardless of the merits of the conservation actions — it unavoidably creates an unequal power relationship (or, more likely, reinforces an already-existing one) between the monitor and the monitored.

This is worth remembering. As was often remarked by those involved in launching the IPBES, the devil lies in the governance structure. As always!

In his blog, Morgan Robertson exposes this issue as a “paradox”.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time — in fact it seems like everything I’ve ever written boils down to “defining environmental commodities is HARD because ecology is complex and commodities need to be abstract”.

The paradox is that the metrics must strike a difficult balance between their ecological precision and their ability to foster exchanges on a market for offsets.

Too much precision (i.e. the habitat for middle-aged great blue herons who don’t like shrimp of Robertson fame since 2004) might better reflect the complexities, or rather the ecological uniqueness, of each location (and time), being assessed. It would however make any market completely useless… At the other extreme, a metric that hardly encompasses these complexities (try wetland area) would make the market highly fungible.

This paradox should be on the mind of anyone developing metrics or methods for assessing ecological equivalence or credit-debit systems, or using them to actually design an offset scheme. The same applies to any type of ecosystem service market off course (PES or otherwise).

It is interesting to note that in their pilot schemes for testing habitat banking, France and the United Kingdom have made very different choices in terms of metrics. More on this later…

After a very good explanation of what is meant by the term biodiversity, Ken Thompson goes on to discuss several key concepts:

One of the fist messages that the book upholds is that biodiversity is the outcome of ecosystem-level properties (structure and processes, including those determined by geography : soils, climate, etc.) and not the other way round. In this sense, conserving biodiversity because it contributes to ecosystem service provision is not the right way to frame the issue. Rather, the loss of biodiversity is an indicator of changing ecosystem-level properties, which lead to specific losses and gains in service provision. Conservation should target ecosystems, not particular species.

Another important message is that conservation actions must take cost-efficiency into account. In this respect, once again, the focus should be on ecosystem properties and not on targeting this or that species. Another related point is the abundance of large areas of wilderness for which conservation actions could have large impacts for little investment. This is especially true when compared with conservation carried out in densely populated areas when land is scarce and thus expensive.

In spite of the opportunity of doing things on a grand scale in the remaining wilderness areas of the world, Ken Thompson also argues that to ensure that people care about biodiversity, they must be exposed to it. As such, biodiversity should be present, and accessible, in people’s everyday surroundings: gardens, urban parks, countryside areas, etc. Reserves are not the solution to that issue.

There are lots of interesting anecdotes and facts in the book but the messages above appear to be the most refreshing from a nature conservation perspective…

Sven Wunder presented the modified definition at the CIVILand conference on payments for ecosystem services and their institutional dimensions organized in November 2011 by the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (pdf of the presentation here).

The definition has been reformulated as follows (in italics):

1. voluntary transaction – to a variable extent on the buyer side; to full extent on provider side

2. a well-defined environmental service (ES) or a land-use proxy, or some bundle thereof

3. is being “bought” by a (min. one) ES buyer – which can be a public entity

4. from a (min. one) ES provider or a community

5. if and only if the ES provider continuously secures ES provision – i.e. conditionality has to be present to some extent in design and function

The institutional needs for PES schemes remain the same: cooperation & trust between providers, buyers, and regulators, land & resource rights, degradation rights, and low transaction costs.

He paints quite a bleak picture of the current situation, where solutions are few, and state coffers are empty… So should we follow the money? Maybe there are opportunities to fund nature conservation through the polluter – pays principle, applied to biodiversity (and wilderness?), instead of the citizen – pays principle of many established policies.

This opportunity is hotly debated at the moment, with many countries working their way towards “no net loss” targets for biodiversity through reinforced obligations for developers to “compensate” their impacts.

Of course, Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy doesn’t fail to mention that those that need to act fastest are the fisheries and farming sectors. They have been given “rights to thrash” and they have used them to a large extent. Shouldn’t they play a part in the application of the polluter-pays principle?

Because the metric uses widely applicable classes of “pristiness”, it can itself be widely applied, at various spatial scales. In fact, NBM relies on existing mapped data concerning land-use and land-cover. This wide applicability is the metric’s main strength.

In trying to apply concepts and ideas developed for green house gas emissions (GHG) to biodiversity, Ecometrica has chosen to simplify the later to a single easy to use metric. Why not? That choice does however raise the issue of over-simplification. When does “pristine” actually equate biodiversity and is that particular biodiversity the most relevant one to consider in assessing an corporation’s impact?

The NBM is designed to provide an equivalent to corporate GHG assessment, for biodiversity impact.

The documentation shows that the metric can incorporate additional field information, e.g. from surveys of the species or habitats that are actually present on-site. Yet, it is clear that the metric was developed to avoid field surveys as much as possible:

the biodiversity assessment methodology cannot be wholly dependent on the use of ecological surveys carried out by experts

Is that really a good idea? As usual, it depends what you use the metric for…

These regulations will be applicable as of June 1st. They are bringing about considerable change in the way biodiversity and ecosystems will be taken into account in development projects and land planning. We will discuss these changes here in the coming weeks.

He ends his talk on the suggestion to focus efforts on “green” and “blue” carbon as part of climate change mitigation. Green and blue carbon is the carbon stored in terrestrial and marine ecosystems respectively.

Pavan Sukhdev tells us that he strongly supports the REDD+ mechanisms, whereby emitting countries fund projects in forested countries that avoid deforestation and/or forest degradation. There is a lot of potential there for synergies between carbon sequestration goals and the continued provision of other ecosystem services (and biodiversity).

Concerning blue carbon, it is interesting to note how he explains that we, collectively, have made the ethical choice to lose coral reefs through unmitigated climate change. It was probably an implicit choice, but it is quite revealing that Pavan Sukhdev and TEEB recognize that there are critical thresholds of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss. Those thresholds can be ecological (to avoid extinction or complete loss) or social but they certainly define the boundaries of our future life support system. Good debates to be had there…

Basically, they state that the industry extracts entertainment value from natural ecosystems and wild fauna and flora, but does not contribute to the cost of conserving these assets. Or at least not in an effective and transparent way.

Today, the media funds nature conservation actions through separate, voluntary initiatives (and the payment of filming fees in some protected areas). Nature conservation projects funded by the media don’t necessarily target the same areas or species used in the films or photography. There is also no mechanism to determine how much funding would adequately reflect the industry’s take. How much is that take anyway?

A key question is whether producers of wildlife content can afford to internalize the production costs of nature into their products.

The authors argue that a better mechanism would be to set up a trust fund, with the money coming from broadcasters on the basis of viewing (e.g. per viewer, or DVD sold etc.) and not as a percentage of production costs. Using common-place ratings and sales data to size payments would lower the cost of setting up the scheme. The trust would also come with a international governing body and transparent certification mechanism for establishing payment rates and monitoring payments.

The authors state that their scheme would ensure that:

Unfortunately, the paper gives no details as to who would be involved in the governing body. It mentions an “international coalition of mass-membership NGOs, wildlife filmmaker associations, and the IUCN” but do not explain their choice. It is also unclear on what basis the certification process would establish the base rates (e.g. per viewer) for paying into the trust fund. The authors mention the need for “careful pricing” and “fair prices” but do not provide applicable solutions. Rather, they leave that difficult task to the NGOs (again!).

leading environmental NGOs need to (…) introduce a PES-style mechanism

Rather surprisingly, the paper has yet to receive the attention of the media outside academic circles. The authors are probably expecting responses. So should you.

In an interesting article*, recently in-press in Biodiversity & Conservation, Kate Sherren and her former colleagues at ANU present survey results on how land-holders in rural Australia view the substitutability of different arrangements of trees and woodlands on their properties. This can be very important for aligning conservation policy such as offset schemes with the values and experience of the people they target.

The rationale for the survey is that at the farm level, substitutions between these elements are made daily, albeit at a small scale: a patch is planted, scattered trees are cut-down etc. These decisions could reveal farmer’s views on their value and their substitutability. The survey found that farmers could be divided into three groups:

What can be done with this knowledge? Well, the authors argue that the main risk with widespread offsetting schemes is that tree cover arrangements will homogenize, towards wooded paddocks that are easier to create, maintain, monitor etc. This could have unintended consequences in terms of landscape-level heterogeneity in habitat for species or ecosystem services, especially those related to scattered trees.

To avoid this homogenization, specific policies could be devised that target the first two types of land-holders, to get them to increase heterogeneity on their land.

This could be done by allowing land-holders to actively suggest measures in favour of tree cover (and bid for funding) such as “crash grazing”, adding coarse woody debris, weed control or planting of under-storey species… These different measures are conducive to improving the “quality” of existing woodland rather than focusing on area-based measures such as grazing exclusion which could tend to homogenize the landscape and have the major caveat of taking land out of production which could be called into question in the long-term.

Measures targeting the management of existing trees and woodlands also have drawbacks. The main one is how long-lasting they can be made, and thus how long the binding contracts have to be made. The USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program is one long-lasting program that can provide inspiration for such renewable management-based contracts with land-holders.

Another difficulty with management based measures such as those outlined above is measuring the actual “gain” they generate, so that they can be sized adequately to offset impacts elsewhere. This probably requires a conservative approach – i.e. over-sizing of offsets – as well as further research on baseline trends and short- and long-term effects of these management changes.

* Sherren K., Yoon H-J., Clayton H. & Schirmer J. (2011): Do Australian graziers have an offset mindset about their farm trees? Biodiversity & Conservation, in press.