Recently, the Natural Capital Project released its new tool for watershed-based ecosystem services decision-making, the Resource Investment Optimization System, or RIOS (spanish for rivers). It builds on InVEST, NCP's tool for mapping and valuing all sorts of services. Where InVEST could tell you for instance where to invest in a watershed to achieve the best water quality gains (efficiency), RIOS is geared to help you decide between different sets of investment (optimization).
RIOS joins a fast-growing cadre of other ecosystem services decision-making software tools. A short list includes:
Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SOLVES) - the USGS's tool of choice
Integrated Water Resources planning suite - led by the Army Corps of Engineers
Simple and Effective Resource for Valuing Ecosystem Services (SERVES) - from Earth Economics
i-Tree - USFS built this one
ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES)
These models literally instantiate ecosystem services as a framework by providing the means for framing services - ES is a framework for understanding tradeoffs in managing nature and here are the algorithms for modeling them. One of the key points the tools have in common is that they are spatially-explicit; what might distinguish them is whether they aim to inform either investment or policy decisions. Or, since ecosystem service policy tends toward treating nature as always already an investment (or lack thereof), the distinction is probably: what kind of investment (public or private)?
These tools parallel a number of data analytics firms working with so-called Big Data on the environment. Many, like Cloudera and Ayasdi work with oil and gas companies to visualize optimize the use of their drilling equipment, in the name of preventing future environmental catastrophes. Others, like Remsoft's suite of tools aim to improve forestry practices by incorporating extensive data on tree health, location, etc. - Google and Microsoft are working on similar software for "seeing the trees and the forest."
In short, the stated goal of these models is to "optimize" environmental management, which, for many of them, also means optimizing business practice. Is there a difference between optimal and efficient? For some, maybe not. But Remsoft's tools, they claim, allow you to "understand and manage the supply-demand balance, identify current and future supply chain bottlenecks, manage production and delivery capacity, forecast costs and revenues, and generate plans that stay within budget." Clearly something more than the sense of efficiency as input/output is going on here. Indeed, optimization, in the language of mathematics and computer programming, means to choose the best from among several alternatives given a particular criteria. Yes, the criterion for Remsoft might be $, but that may or may not be the case for USFS's community forestry tool, i-Tree.
Where does all this talk of optimization come from? That's hard to say, and 600 pg. tomes have been written about it. But there is a curious perpendicular conversation happening in the weird realm of biology, computer programming, and artificial intelligence themselves meet: where NCP, Remsoft, and others want to optimize nature, these researchers think nature optimizes. They "use and abuse" evolutionary concepts (note: optimization is not necessarily about selection pressure) as metaphor for informing tech design, their goals ranging from the everyday to the lethal. Researchers have found that ants respond to disaster and disruption - to their environment - in ways that may inform optimal transmission of information over internet protocols. The US military has enrolled apiologists to use bee swarms as an analogue for drone maneuvering. The goal, of course, being to optimize surveillance and kill rates. What brings together the "optimize nature" modelers and the "nature optimizes" researchers and designers is the idea that the environment serves as a model for our treatment of it.
This is not to get us lost in the thickets of environmental philosophy or social theory. The question is: on the ground, what is lost and gained by thinking in terms of optimizing ecosystem services? Who stands to win and lose? These models are meant to inform land use decisions, and in doing so, they help to bring about the optimized world they only purport to represent. If you model it, they will come. In this performance, the way the models are programmed matters. And what differences are there between the flavor of optimization led by the conservationists using NCP and the timber managers using Remsoft's Spatial Optimizer? One has to inform policy, the other business - can optimization serve as an adequate guiding concept for both?
Showing posts with label Natural Capital Project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Natural Capital Project. Show all posts
Friday, July 19, 2013
Monday, February 25, 2013
TEEB and spatially-explicit ecosystem services valuation
I just read the new TEEB report on the state of the world's wetland and water ecosystem services. In case you didn't know, TEEB is The Economics of the Environment and Biodiversity. They're a group led by Pavan Sukhdev, and they're one of the leading champions of ecosystem services accounting out there right now, internationally. Geographers, for one, have had their say about TEEB here and here.
There's a lot going on in the TEEB wetlands report. Let's walk through what they're doing and why and how it might matter to the average practitioner on the ground. What the TEEB report's authors are out to do is to assess the current state of the world's wetlands in terms of the provisioning, regulation, habitat, and cultural ecosystem services they provide. Contrary to what a lot of folks expect from TEEB, there's only so much in this report on monetary valuation - that is, coming up with a price amount on services as an expression of their value (a couple of posts back when I said I'd get to value, I meant it!) Sure there are figures like Table 2.2 (pg. 10) that spell out minimum and maximum values (in International $/ha/year - Int. dollars are basically a standardized unit to account for purchasing power) for different kinds of aquatic ecosystems and different kinds of services. But the TEEB authors are at great pains to show you they recognize that the process of valuation - who participates, who benefits, etc. - matters as well.
The problem is that accounting for the process of ecosystem service valuation is difficult to do in chart form. It's hard for TEEB to keep the pricing cat from getting out of the bag, as it were, since:
...to ignore the economic value (including monetary value) of nature is to reduce the ability to make robust arguments that have a chance of informing decisions for the conservation of important ecosystems. The use of monetary valuation in many cases enhances the social visibility of the benefits brought about by environmental protection and restoration. By doing so, it can act as a counterweight to the pressures causing environmental degradation, which are driven by economic activities where market prices do not take into account negative impacts on health and the environment (sometimes termed “externalities”). (27)
Pricing services, or, as the TEEB slogan goes, "making nature's values visible," means that governmental and corporate decision-makers will and thus stop environmental degradation. They might even promote protection and restoration if they can see the economic benefits of doing so. And so that's why in Table 2.2 we see that, for instance, the value of the regulating services of inland wetlands is somewhere between 321 and 23,018 Int.$/ha/year.
But what are nature's values? Value is something you hear a lot when you're dealing with ecosystem services. For now, I'll offer the following simple definition, and hope you'll come to agree with it: value is the contextual opportunity or constraint to service provision. Ecosystem services and their values are relative, depending on where you are and where you look. The authors of the TEEB report realize this. They write, "Ecosystem functions, the flow of ecosystem services, and the economic value to society and the economy are site specific ...." (TEEB 2013, 08)
Likewise, leading ecosystem services advocate Gretchen Daily said in a recent interview: "We need to be able to pinpoint places on the landscape or on the seascape and say these places are really the most important for supplying these benefits, and if we were to invest in protecting them, we would get this return on the investment."
Lest you think value is an esoteric exercise left to the preserve of global pundits, note that state environmental agencies in the US are considered with ecosystem value as well. The word itself is in many statutes, and here's how Oregon's Department of State Lands, for one, sees it: “[Value is] the importance or worth of a wetland function to societal needs. This includes public attitudes and the wetland’s opportunity to provide a given function based on its location.” Again, value means opportunity to provide a function, and this opportunity is spatial in nature.
Value as opportunity isn't some abstract notion, existing only in the minds of ecosystem services advocates and state environmental regulators. It's getting put into practice. The Natural Capital Project is a global coalition of academics out to valorize services. In particular, they're interested in the spatiality of services. They've come up with this serivcesheds idea (see the figure to the right). The idea is to help people conceptualize where nature's benefits come from. So, as the diagram shows, the benefits of carbon sequestration apparently come from and benefit everyone globally. But clean water for fish is a much more specific value, dependent on people's recreational demands.
There's a lot going on in the TEEB wetlands report. Let's walk through what they're doing and why and how it might matter to the average practitioner on the ground. What the TEEB report's authors are out to do is to assess the current state of the world's wetlands in terms of the provisioning, regulation, habitat, and cultural ecosystem services they provide. Contrary to what a lot of folks expect from TEEB, there's only so much in this report on monetary valuation - that is, coming up with a price amount on services as an expression of their value (a couple of posts back when I said I'd get to value, I meant it!) Sure there are figures like Table 2.2 (pg. 10) that spell out minimum and maximum values (in International $/ha/year - Int. dollars are basically a standardized unit to account for purchasing power) for different kinds of aquatic ecosystems and different kinds of services. But the TEEB authors are at great pains to show you they recognize that the process of valuation - who participates, who benefits, etc. - matters as well.
The problem is that accounting for the process of ecosystem service valuation is difficult to do in chart form. It's hard for TEEB to keep the pricing cat from getting out of the bag, as it were, since:
...to ignore the economic value (including monetary value) of nature is to reduce the ability to make robust arguments that have a chance of informing decisions for the conservation of important ecosystems. The use of monetary valuation in many cases enhances the social visibility of the benefits brought about by environmental protection and restoration. By doing so, it can act as a counterweight to the pressures causing environmental degradation, which are driven by economic activities where market prices do not take into account negative impacts on health and the environment (sometimes termed “externalities”). (27)
Pricing services, or, as the TEEB slogan goes, "making nature's values visible," means that governmental and corporate decision-makers will and thus stop environmental degradation. They might even promote protection and restoration if they can see the economic benefits of doing so. And so that's why in Table 2.2 we see that, for instance, the value of the regulating services of inland wetlands is somewhere between 321 and 23,018 Int.$/ha/year.
But what are nature's values? Value is something you hear a lot when you're dealing with ecosystem services. For now, I'll offer the following simple definition, and hope you'll come to agree with it: value is the contextual opportunity or constraint to service provision. Ecosystem services and their values are relative, depending on where you are and where you look. The authors of the TEEB report realize this. They write, "Ecosystem functions, the flow of ecosystem services, and the economic value to society and the economy are site specific ...." (TEEB 2013, 08)
Likewise, leading ecosystem services advocate Gretchen Daily said in a recent interview: "We need to be able to pinpoint places on the landscape or on the seascape and say these places are really the most important for supplying these benefits, and if we were to invest in protecting them, we would get this return on the investment."Lest you think value is an esoteric exercise left to the preserve of global pundits, note that state environmental agencies in the US are considered with ecosystem value as well. The word itself is in many statutes, and here's how Oregon's Department of State Lands, for one, sees it: “[Value is] the importance or worth of a wetland function to societal needs. This includes public attitudes and the wetland’s opportunity to provide a given function based on its location.” Again, value means opportunity to provide a function, and this opportunity is spatial in nature.
Value as opportunity isn't some abstract notion, existing only in the minds of ecosystem services advocates and state environmental regulators. It's getting put into practice. The Natural Capital Project is a global coalition of academics out to valorize services. In particular, they're interested in the spatiality of services. They've come up with this serivcesheds idea (see the figure to the right). The idea is to help people conceptualize where nature's benefits come from. So, as the diagram shows, the benefits of carbon sequestration apparently come from and benefit everyone globally. But clean water for fish is a much more specific value, dependent on people's recreational demands.
What I'm bring this all back to is this: At the same time we see a drive by the Natural Capital Project and some environmental agencies to name value as dependent on where the services are in relation to where the beneficiaries are, we have the TEEB report. TEEB calculates global values. But how can you have one global value for wetlands, when wetland values are always in the eye of the beholder? These global values do just sum up local contextual values, but what good do they do an individual policy-maker? What does it mean that the value of the regulating services of all inland wetlands is somewhere between 321 and 23,018 Int.$/ha/year? Even US President Obama can take little action to save, in one fell swoop, all the world's freshwater wetlands and their regulating values, much less all the world's wetlands and all their values. Maybe he can save a couple wetlands, say outside of his city, Chicago, but TEEB's numbers don't tell him much about the importance of saving those specific ones. Likewise, for an environmental regulator in say Oregon, TEEB's numbers tell them relatively little about the wetland down the street and its worth. So which way do you think we should we have it - global values a la TEEB, or site specific ones like from the Natural Capital Project?
I'm not sure myself; there's uses to both. Right now, I want to briefly hint that there is a potentially serious discrepancy between local and global values when it comes to climate change in particular. The value of a coastal wetland in New York providing services like water storage and delay that buffer climate impacts like sea level rise is a local value. That local value is only a value because of a global problem. If climate change weren't a threat to New York, there wouldn't necessarily be any value for that wetland to be there. Moreover, the value of a forest sequestration project may be more global than it is local because carbon sequestration benefits everyone.
In the next post, I'll write more about climate change and ecosystem services. Climate change is so often seen as a temporal problem - it will cause ecosystem services to be less "resilient" over time because of extreme events. But it will also raise some serious spatial scale dilemmas.
Figure from "Servicesheds." The Natural Capital Project. http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/servicesheds.html
I'm not sure myself; there's uses to both. Right now, I want to briefly hint that there is a potentially serious discrepancy between local and global values when it comes to climate change in particular. The value of a coastal wetland in New York providing services like water storage and delay that buffer climate impacts like sea level rise is a local value. That local value is only a value because of a global problem. If climate change weren't a threat to New York, there wouldn't necessarily be any value for that wetland to be there. Moreover, the value of a forest sequestration project may be more global than it is local because carbon sequestration benefits everyone.
In the next post, I'll write more about climate change and ecosystem services. Climate change is so often seen as a temporal problem - it will cause ecosystem services to be less "resilient" over time because of extreme events. But it will also raise some serious spatial scale dilemmas.
Figure from "Servicesheds." The Natural Capital Project. http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/servicesheds.html
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