What would you do if you had about a billion dollars for ecological restoration?
That's exactly what the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (or, Council) is trying to figure out. That's no easy task given that the Council is a powerhouse, high-level government entity composed of the five Gulf Coast governors and six executive branch Cabinet members (think secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, EPA administrator, etc.)The Council came into being when President Obama signed the RESTORE Act last year. That Act put 80% of the Clean Water Act fines BP and Transocean are going to pay for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the hands of the Council. It's the largest pot of money for restoration in the US ever.
Question is, how do you even go about spending that much money in a time when any sort of surplus in government hands seems like the work of a divine hand, and so usually gets cannibalized in the ritual sacrifices that follow? [Update: the sequester is already taking a 5% toll on RESTORE Act funds] Well, this Council has a comprehensive plan. More accurately, as of late last week the Council has put out their initial comprehensive plan that describes the principles for how it will distribute money to various Gulf Coast restoration projects and programs. I had the chance to read it; here are my initial reactions:
1. "The decisions made pursuant to the Plan will be based on the best available science, and this Plan will evolve over time to incorporate new science, information, and changing conditions. The Council will coordinate with the scientific community to improve decision-making." (5)It's a living, breathing document. It's meant to change over time, as funding levels and priorities change, but also with new science. Whether scientists can tell them what they want or need to hear, is of course another question.
2. No one actually knows how much money there is, since so much of it is tied to pending litigation. The number could go up past 10 billion when BP pays up.
3. The plan doesn't actually spell out how the Council will fund anything, nor what it would most like to fund. A funding strategy and priorities list come later.
4. "Storm risk, land loss, depletion of natural resources, compromised water quality and quantity, and sea-level rise are imperiling coastal communities’ natural defenses and ability to respond to natural and man-made disruptions." (4) It's clear that the Council sees ecosystem health as fundamental to community health, though no necessarily vice versa, and that this means a weaker ability to adapt to future climate and other disasters.
5. Scientists do seem to have gotten across the point that restoring species alone, on postage-stamp size sites is not the best approach to restoration. "The Council recognizes that upland, estuarine, and marine habitats are intrinsically connected, and will promote ecosystem-based and landscape-scale restoration without regard to geographic location within the Gulf Coast region." The planners apparently see themselves as immune to geographic bias and politics, and there's some good landscape ecology here.
6. It only comes up once, but it's unclear what the role of the private sector is here. However, much ado is made about coordinating with other efforts, in general: "The Council will encourage partnerships and welcome additional public and private financial and technical support to maximize outcomes and impacts. Such partnerships will add value through integration of public and private sector skills, knowledge, and expertise" (7) There are a growing number of voluntary restoration projects in the works, not to mention talk of linking up with California's cap and trade scheme for wetland blue carbon credits, and how to coordinate these market sector activities with a federal plan will be worth watching.
7. You don't spend a billion dollars and not have anything to show for it. "The Council recognizes the importance of measuring outcomes and impacts in order to achieve tangible results and ensure that funds are invested in a meaningful way." (7) There's an opening here for ecosystem services accounting, but we'll have to wait and see.
8. The money quote from the whole thing is the Council's definition of ecosystem restoration. That's kinda what they're about anyway:
"All activities, projects, methods, and procedures appropriate to enhance the health and resilience of the Gulf Coast ecosystem, as measured in terms of the physical, biological, or chemical properties of the ecosystem, or the services it provides, and to strengthen its ability to support the diverse economies, communities, and cultures of the region. It includes activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability. It also includes protecting and conserving ecosystems so they can continue to reduce impacts from tropical storms and other disasters, support robust economies, and assist in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change (per Executive Order 13554)."
There's a lot going on here! What is restoration? Well, it's not just bulldozers and backhoes, it's methods and procedures. In other words, it's science and technical expertise just as much as it is new wetlands. Watch for this to become controversial, with conservationists claiming that not enough money is being spent on the ground in actual projects. What's the goal? Health, resilience, and mitigation of climate impacts. It's not clear to me that there isn't potentially a huge tradeoff between the ecosystem health and ability to mitigate climate impacts, but we'll see. How do you get there? You initiate or accelerate recover, or you protect and conserve. And finally, how do you measure it all? Straight out of the CWA, it's physical, biological, or chemical properties. Or, ecosystem services.
9. The last point is, again, the Council won't be just drawing on existing marine and wetland science, and they won't just be incorporating the best available science as it hits the presses, they're producing it. The sense is that there's a lot yet to figure out yet in the planning, technical assistance, and implementation phases of restoration, and that the Council is more than ready to dish out money to "evaluation and establishment of monitoring requirements and methods to report outcomes and impacts; and measurement, evaluation, and reporting of outcomes and impacts of restoration activities." (15) The question will be, what kind of science is the Council interested in funding?
Showing posts with label metrics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metrics. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Communicating ecosystem services
I'm out here in Portland, Ore. and I had the chance a couple of weeks ago now to sit in on several sessions of the Ecosystem Services Partnership conference. ESP is an international academic and practitioner conference, hosted for the first time in the US this year.
One of the best parts of the conference was a "Global Policy Forum" dedicated to drafting response to a recommendation by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for a national ecosystem services trends assessment and for federal agencies to value their impacts on ecosystem services. The energetic discussion revolved around four questions the conveners had set up for us:
1. do we need a common set of terms on ecosystem services?
2. what are the key ecological questions that need answering? - the science question
3. how do we value ecosystem services? when is monetization appropriate? - the market question
4. how do we make effective change on ecosystem services? - the policy question
What folks ended up spinning their wheels over throughout the conversation was: yes, of course we need a common set of questions, terms, and answers so that we can compare Jackson County larks to Jackson County larks, and to show decision-makers that a lark is worth as much as, say, 10 acres of productive cropland. That way, policy people can make the right decisions.
The odd part is that we had to answer the "how do we communicate ecosystem services?" question in the first place. The question seems to me, at one level, to be an oxymoron. I'd always thought the whole point of the ecosystem services concept was that it made nature "visible" to decision-makers by characterizing not nature qua nature but as something that did stuff for society. Obviously, it's not as easy as that. There are still lots of choices to be made about what should be "legible", choices that matter: At what end of the spectrum you might have an ecologist say (as one did at the forum) well we need multiple, fuzzy terms because boxing things into $ or even Discounted Service Acre Years just doesn't tell me much about the condition of the lark. On the other extreme, all that a lawmaker (or one practitioner at the forum) might feel they need to see is the $ of a lark.
Which is exactly why we can't just talk our way to better ecologies. Lamenting "if only we had the right terms" assumes endangered birds or streams have terms best suited to them as birds or streams and ignores the specific politics of setting the terms in each case. For starters, you need translators who can talk lark science, policy, and economics. Those people are not always easy to find. Second, as with speaking a foreign language, there's always something about the lark or whatever that gets lost in translation.
The key question is: can we be ok with 5, 10, or 20 different ways of measuring Jackson county lark habitat? There are good reasons why there should and shouln't be one
lark metric: USFWS might like to be able to compare specific habitats across the species's range so it can square impacts with restoration in a species mitigation scheme. But that's perhaps a different purpose than even NRCS wanting to have a way to gage which restoration projects are priorities to fund. The problem then is that you can't necessarily go back and equate the results of the two metrics.
Here's the true point, which is not that politics pollutes all science and so we might as well give up on "correctly" assessing ecosystem services. It's simply that there's something to be said for a diversity of metrics that stand on their own terms for their own purposes. And there are surely cases where the science, market, and policy can come together and say, hey, that'll work for all of us (a process the Willamette Partnership has facilitated in Oregon). The point is that figuring it out takes translators and a willingness to accept that you'll probably lose something in translation.
EN
Note: How to communicate ecosystem services across science and policy is perhaps just a subset of the question: how to message the term "ecosystem services" or whether to use a different phrasing all together. The Nature Conservancy recently comissioned an intriguing report on that question. Their consultants found that ecosystem services doesn't really resonate at all with the voting public, but nature's benefits or value do.
One of the best parts of the conference was a "Global Policy Forum" dedicated to drafting response to a recommendation by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology for a national ecosystem services trends assessment and for federal agencies to value their impacts on ecosystem services. The energetic discussion revolved around four questions the conveners had set up for us:
1. do we need a common set of terms on ecosystem services?
2. what are the key ecological questions that need answering? - the science question
3. how do we value ecosystem services? when is monetization appropriate? - the market question
4. how do we make effective change on ecosystem services? - the policy question
What folks ended up spinning their wheels over throughout the conversation was: yes, of course we need a common set of questions, terms, and answers so that we can compare Jackson County larks to Jackson County larks, and to show decision-makers that a lark is worth as much as, say, 10 acres of productive cropland. That way, policy people can make the right decisions.
The odd part is that we had to answer the "how do we communicate ecosystem services?" question in the first place. The question seems to me, at one level, to be an oxymoron. I'd always thought the whole point of the ecosystem services concept was that it made nature "visible" to decision-makers by characterizing not nature qua nature but as something that did stuff for society. Obviously, it's not as easy as that. There are still lots of choices to be made about what should be "legible", choices that matter: At what end of the spectrum you might have an ecologist say (as one did at the forum) well we need multiple, fuzzy terms because boxing things into $ or even Discounted Service Acre Years just doesn't tell me much about the condition of the lark. On the other extreme, all that a lawmaker (or one practitioner at the forum) might feel they need to see is the $ of a lark.
Which is exactly why we can't just talk our way to better ecologies. Lamenting "if only we had the right terms" assumes endangered birds or streams have terms best suited to them as birds or streams and ignores the specific politics of setting the terms in each case. For starters, you need translators who can talk lark science, policy, and economics. Those people are not always easy to find. Second, as with speaking a foreign language, there's always something about the lark or whatever that gets lost in translation.
The key question is: can we be ok with 5, 10, or 20 different ways of measuring Jackson county lark habitat? There are good reasons why there should and shouln't be one
lark metric: USFWS might like to be able to compare specific habitats across the species's range so it can square impacts with restoration in a species mitigation scheme. But that's perhaps a different purpose than even NRCS wanting to have a way to gage which restoration projects are priorities to fund. The problem then is that you can't necessarily go back and equate the results of the two metrics.
Here's the true point, which is not that politics pollutes all science and so we might as well give up on "correctly" assessing ecosystem services. It's simply that there's something to be said for a diversity of metrics that stand on their own terms for their own purposes. And there are surely cases where the science, market, and policy can come together and say, hey, that'll work for all of us (a process the Willamette Partnership has facilitated in Oregon). The point is that figuring it out takes translators and a willingness to accept that you'll probably lose something in translation.
EN
Note: How to communicate ecosystem services across science and policy is perhaps just a subset of the question: how to message the term "ecosystem services" or whether to use a different phrasing all together. The Nature Conservancy recently comissioned an intriguing report on that question. Their consultants found that ecosystem services doesn't really resonate at all with the voting public, but nature's benefits or value do.
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