"Designing better environmental governance always entails addressing the question: better for whom?" (Norgaard 2010)
I've written recently a lot about communicating ecosystem services. Conservationists, regulators, scientists, and entrepreneurs are all struggling to make the concept intelligible to decision-makers (and ultimately make nature qua service intelligible to these politicians and businesses...) But there's another sense communication is at play here, in the idea that the public can express values concerning ecosystem services through some sort of deliberative arena. Let me explain.
The idea that people can and should discuss their values, preferences, and opinions about the use and maintenance of nature's benefits finds its home in ecosystem services economics perhaps most notably via Bob Costanza. In a sense, he is drawing broadly on folks like Habermas and Sen, who wrote under the banner of social choice theory. What these authors are getting at is that environmental values per se are of a different nature than mere preferences about the way the world should be and as such cannot be reduced to choices about, say, which brand of carbon credit I want to buy. Instead, they have to be expressed, reasoned, and maybe changed through debate, conservation, and so on. What they are reacting to is public choice theory, whose proponents see political decisions as the result only of rational, conscious decision-making, as if democracy was merely a market subject to the forces of supply and demand. For these folks, preferences about the state of the (natural) world are values, and they are best expressed through market-like arenas.
The vision of democracy in public choice theory is rather anemic, but what is the vision of democracy in social choice theory? I'm not sure Costanza et al., at least in 1997's Nature's Services, made it out to be much different than what we've currently got. If "society" decides a carbon tax is needed, so be it and make it so through institutions. These institutions may range from to local public trusts or watershed districts, to - and perhaps more likely (in Costanza's reasoning) for something like carbon - Congress. But it should take only a second for even the most casual reader to think, well, how is that going to work out? When was the last time Congress got anything substantive done?
Don't get me wrong, I'm for more deliberative discussions. Democracy can mean a lot of things, and if it means something like direct democracy, where relevant solidarities can set the terms of the discussion, rather than deliberating a pre-defined or even pre-determined point, I'm for it. And Costanza (with Farley 2010) has done a lot of work imagining the role of institutions in ecosystem services provision. At the least, I'm for it since it would mean that decision-makers recognize environmental values that are articulated outside of what we buy and sell. But what this conversation about ecosystem services democracy overlooks is the underlying question of, as Norgaard was getting at, who wins and loses from
And so a related discussion revolves around the question of whether justice is merely a matter of distribution. Is it a just outcome when everyone receives a similar amount of compensation for a similar amount of, say, ecosystem services provision? It was for this guy called Rawls, who asked us to imagine, under a "veil of ignorance" as if we hadn't been born yet, how we would like wealth in the world to be distributed. Sen took this idea one step further and argued that there is a procedural basis to justice as well. Essentially, this is the idea of equal opportunity, or as Sen puts it, "capability". This might mean equal capability to access employment, but in this case it would mean equal capability of participating in conversations about the use and maintenance of ecosystem services.
Tim Forsyth recently extended Sen's (and Rawl's) ideas about justice to climate change. He calls for conceptualizing climate justice as an open and procedural act that is defined by a more inclusive determining of climate risks, as opposed to merely a matter of getting the distribution of benefits (and risks or harms) right. He tries to reframe Sen's point as not just about equal opportunity or "capability" in defining the problem. He writes, "Climate change policy is not simply allocating solutions to melting ice. And an inclusive process is not just diversifying discussion of how to do this." (3) But I'm not sure he gets out of the trap of "just diversifying discussion", as I'm still left wondering, if we include more capable voices, don't we just get cacophony? And is it right to include more voices in, say, the use of local flood prevention services in Africa?
In other words, these authors are unhelpful when it comes to making the analytical distinction, whose voices? But more importantly, to what extent do we actually need to continue to discuss the issue at hand? We know services globally face continued threats, but can a diverse discussion help us talk our way out of it?
Upcoming: I'll dig more into this question of justice, because has I hinted at in the end, it has a really key scalar component - where do decisions get made? If ecosystem services are embedded in some spatial extent of society and ecology, should decisions about their provision be contextual as well?
I'll also talk more about this idea of value. Answering why and how ecosystem services are ecologically and socially valuable is of course de rigeur, if not by definition, but to what degree do services' values rely on their context? To whom do they become valuable? And more philosophically - what is this value thing I'm talking about anyway?
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Communicating ecosystem services, take two
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw
I wasn't able to make it to ACES, but I've been reading over some of the reports. Seems like a lot of the conference was focused on how to communicate ecosystem services to politicians, corporations, and the public. As one commentator put it, "...it's high time for the ecosystem services community to get its elevator speech ready."
In an earlier post, I noted that the focus on messaging ecosystem services was kind of ironic since the whole services idea was in large part about getting around the difficulty of communication. In the intro to the 1997 agenda-setting Nature's Services, the rationale was laid out: "[L]ack of understanding of the character and value of natural ecosystems traces ultimately to a failure of the scientific community to generate, synthesize, and effectively convey the necessary information to the public." (xv) Nature was supposed to be a set of functions that provided society with clean air, clean water, etc., and we could count them and maybe even monetize them; the language was supposed to express itself to those in charge.
I could stop here and say, well, we're spinning our wheels when it comes to how to convince policy-makers and businesses to see nature's benefits and that the failure to do so is bad. After all, I shouldn't need to remind anybody about climate change, loss of biodiversity, floods, water supply, etc. But I think spinning wheels right now might in fact be productive. It's at least indicative of an interesting moment. People might be realizing what they're up against, and that ecosystem service advocacy can't just be about communicating.
Memes may be one good communication tool, but deeper down there's a bigger issue here. Craig Hanson put it, "Running numbers only gets you so far. There is a political economy game to be played." As much as advocates might speak in business language to corporations, we see that they're not necessarily interested. Indeed, "Ecosystem services management doesn't necessarily generate any new revenues for business, making it a harder sell."
So people may start trying to figure out how to talk about ecosystem services in a way that doesn't necessarily mean dollars and cents, and that's always a good thing. People have certainly been doing that for a while, but maybe now it's becoming more refined, accepted, and visible. What do you think?
I wasn't able to make it to ACES, but I've been reading over some of the reports. Seems like a lot of the conference was focused on how to communicate ecosystem services to politicians, corporations, and the public. As one commentator put it, "...it's high time for the ecosystem services community to get its elevator speech ready."
In an earlier post, I noted that the focus on messaging ecosystem services was kind of ironic since the whole services idea was in large part about getting around the difficulty of communication. In the intro to the 1997 agenda-setting Nature's Services, the rationale was laid out: "[L]ack of understanding of the character and value of natural ecosystems traces ultimately to a failure of the scientific community to generate, synthesize, and effectively convey the necessary information to the public." (xv) Nature was supposed to be a set of functions that provided society with clean air, clean water, etc., and we could count them and maybe even monetize them; the language was supposed to express itself to those in charge.
I could stop here and say, well, we're spinning our wheels when it comes to how to convince policy-makers and businesses to see nature's benefits and that the failure to do so is bad. After all, I shouldn't need to remind anybody about climate change, loss of biodiversity, floods, water supply, etc. But I think spinning wheels right now might in fact be productive. It's at least indicative of an interesting moment. People might be realizing what they're up against, and that ecosystem service advocacy can't just be about communicating.
Memes may be one good communication tool, but deeper down there's a bigger issue here. Craig Hanson put it, "Running numbers only gets you so far. There is a political economy game to be played." As much as advocates might speak in business language to corporations, we see that they're not necessarily interested. Indeed, "Ecosystem services management doesn't necessarily generate any new revenues for business, making it a harder sell."
So people may start trying to figure out how to talk about ecosystem services in a way that doesn't necessarily mean dollars and cents, and that's always a good thing. People have certainly been doing that for a while, but maybe now it's becoming more refined, accepted, and visible. What do you think?
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Life, Equimarginality, and the Pursuit of Happiness
Equimarginality....wait, equi-who? Equimargina-what? It's a big word, but it's one many environmental economists use explicitly a lot and a concept others also use frequently, if not stating it as such. And it sets the stage for the politics of ecosystem service markets.
It's kind of the holy grail or lynchpin of environmental economics really. If "command and control" policies - that is, mandating that each firm, or each sector even, use the "best available pollution abatement technology" - fail, it's because, the story goes, these policies don't acknowledge the fact that each factory or wastewater treatment plant or housing developer has unique cost schedules for dealing with whatever their external cost to society happens to be. Some firms can mitigate emissions, effluents, or habitat impacts more easily than others.
Outside of a textbook, it's hard to find a good diagram of what equimarginality means. Here's my best shot:
Source: Del Rio Gonzalez, Pablo. 2008. Policy implications of potential conflicts between short-term and long-term efficiency in CO2 emissions. Ecological Economics 65(2):292-303
Instead of setting a quota on the amount of emissions, the state levies a tax on the emissions (P*), the idea being to change underlying incentives that spur a firm to generate CO2. You can see that if all firms had to produce only, say, EsubB emissions, the regulation would be far cheaper for some (Firm A) and much more costly for others (Firm C). The idea with equimarginality is that, across firms, there is some magical point where "society's" extra buck spent on abatement or conservation doesn't return more than dollar's worth of pollution reduction or habitat protection.
Where am I going with this boring econ lecture? Treating each polluting or habitat destroying firm as if it had special needs means allowing for more degradation in some spaces/environments and less in others. Equimarginality is marked by two spatial variations on a theme of measurement:
1. In theory, the efficient amount a polluter should abate will depend on where it pollutes. If your car is pumping out SO2 in the middle of the Mojave Desert, I mean, what effect is that having on society, really? (beyond acid rain...) Since the health effects of vehicular SO2 are quite localized, the answer is probably very little, so why should the driver have to pay as much in fees as someone driving the same car in downtown LA. Well, it's extremely hard to know how much each vehicle is driven where...And it's even tougher to pinpoint how much that 1999 Saturn XL CA license plate #304 ACL's exhaust contributes to the weathering of Lexington, Kentucky's grand limestone edifices.
2. By the same coin, where polluters do mitigate will be where it is least costly to do so. All things being equal, if I'm given the flexibility as a wind energy company putting up turbines in the mountain West to abate my turbines' impacts on sage grouse habitat, I'm going to do so where it's easiest to. That's probably where land is most expensive anyway and where the wind isn't as good. That may or may not have anything to do with the quality of sage grouse habitat there.
These variations on how to measure and mitigate externalities ultimately add up to a bigger question about "where to put things." My point here is two-fold: there's more to be said for conservation than efficiency; spatial efficiency depends on the resource and who you talk to. There's no one optimal answer. Whether spatial efficiency for an economist means the same thing as spatial efficiency for a conservationist is questionable. The clearest example of where the two most likely do not line up is hotspots - river reaches, for instance, where a disproportionate number of factories dump nutrients and buy offset credits upstream from farmers because the marginal cost for reducing N or P inputs into rivers is much lower for Farmer John than a modern wastewater treatment facility. Apparently, CO2 quickly circulates globally and so hotspots may be less of a concern (but see this research suggesting CO2 exacerbates local air quality conditions). Still, think about discussions in global carbon markets: where are the cheapest places to offset emissions? which countries get to pollute more, which should reduce emissions? These are some of the most animating politics of carbon markets and are girded by the
I find that equimarginality plays out in an interesting way in habitat and species banking, because where firms can destroy or compensate for habitat is perhaps more (ecologically) important than with carbon or water, and so has important political implications for landscape conservation. When it comes to carbon, what you hear is a carbon sequestering forest there is as good as one over here. But with habitat, the wetland here may serve an especially valuable role for species migrations in the landscape, a role that can't necessarily be replaced over there. For conservationists, there's a value in particular ecosystems in particular places. Again, the question is whose values win the day, or in what combination? To what extent can and will state agencies step in and say to developers, "look we don't want you mucking up habitat here. And if you are going to make an offset to an impact, how about not necessarily where it's cheapest for you, how about over here where we think it's going to have the most effect?"
My goal here has been to show how on its own terms the logic of equimarginality is: 1) in principle, spatial; 2) how this pursuit of spatiality, at a minimum complicates environmental economics, but really, I think, makes the whole notion of equimarginality more or less useless, except as the object of ecosystem service politics.
It's kind of the holy grail or lynchpin of environmental economics really. If "command and control" policies - that is, mandating that each firm, or each sector even, use the "best available pollution abatement technology" - fail, it's because, the story goes, these policies don't acknowledge the fact that each factory or wastewater treatment plant or housing developer has unique cost schedules for dealing with whatever their external cost to society happens to be. Some firms can mitigate emissions, effluents, or habitat impacts more easily than others.
Outside of a textbook, it's hard to find a good diagram of what equimarginality means. Here's my best shot:
Source: Del Rio Gonzalez, Pablo. 2008. Policy implications of potential conflicts between short-term and long-term efficiency in CO2 emissions. Ecological Economics 65(2):292-303
Instead of setting a quota on the amount of emissions, the state levies a tax on the emissions (P*), the idea being to change underlying incentives that spur a firm to generate CO2. You can see that if all firms had to produce only, say, EsubB emissions, the regulation would be far cheaper for some (Firm A) and much more costly for others (Firm C). The idea with equimarginality is that, across firms, there is some magical point where "society's" extra buck spent on abatement or conservation doesn't return more than dollar's worth of pollution reduction or habitat protection.
Where am I going with this boring econ lecture? Treating each polluting or habitat destroying firm as if it had special needs means allowing for more degradation in some spaces/environments and less in others. Equimarginality is marked by two spatial variations on a theme of measurement:
1. In theory, the efficient amount a polluter should abate will depend on where it pollutes. If your car is pumping out SO2 in the middle of the Mojave Desert, I mean, what effect is that having on society, really? (beyond acid rain...) Since the health effects of vehicular SO2 are quite localized, the answer is probably very little, so why should the driver have to pay as much in fees as someone driving the same car in downtown LA. Well, it's extremely hard to know how much each vehicle is driven where...And it's even tougher to pinpoint how much that 1999 Saturn XL CA license plate #304 ACL's exhaust contributes to the weathering of Lexington, Kentucky's grand limestone edifices.
2. By the same coin, where polluters do mitigate will be where it is least costly to do so. All things being equal, if I'm given the flexibility as a wind energy company putting up turbines in the mountain West to abate my turbines' impacts on sage grouse habitat, I'm going to do so where it's easiest to. That's probably where land is most expensive anyway and where the wind isn't as good. That may or may not have anything to do with the quality of sage grouse habitat there.
These variations on how to measure and mitigate externalities ultimately add up to a bigger question about "where to put things." My point here is two-fold: there's more to be said for conservation than efficiency; spatial efficiency depends on the resource and who you talk to. There's no one optimal answer. Whether spatial efficiency for an economist means the same thing as spatial efficiency for a conservationist is questionable. The clearest example of where the two most likely do not line up is hotspots - river reaches, for instance, where a disproportionate number of factories dump nutrients and buy offset credits upstream from farmers because the marginal cost for reducing N or P inputs into rivers is much lower for Farmer John than a modern wastewater treatment facility. Apparently, CO2 quickly circulates globally and so hotspots may be less of a concern (but see this research suggesting CO2 exacerbates local air quality conditions). Still, think about discussions in global carbon markets: where are the cheapest places to offset emissions? which countries get to pollute more, which should reduce emissions? These are some of the most animating politics of carbon markets and are girded by the
I find that equimarginality plays out in an interesting way in habitat and species banking, because where firms can destroy or compensate for habitat is perhaps more (ecologically) important than with carbon or water, and so has important political implications for landscape conservation. When it comes to carbon, what you hear is a carbon sequestering forest there is as good as one over here. But with habitat, the wetland here may serve an especially valuable role for species migrations in the landscape, a role that can't necessarily be replaced over there. For conservationists, there's a value in particular ecosystems in particular places. Again, the question is whose values win the day, or in what combination? To what extent can and will state agencies step in and say to developers, "look we don't want you mucking up habitat here. And if you are going to make an offset to an impact, how about not necessarily where it's cheapest for you, how about over here where we think it's going to have the most effect?"
My goal here has been to show how on its own terms the logic of equimarginality is: 1) in principle, spatial; 2) how this pursuit of spatiality, at a minimum complicates environmental economics, but really, I think, makes the whole notion of equimarginality more or less useless, except as the object of ecosystem service politics.
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.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Who didn't start the fire? Some difficulties in (sage grouse) conservation
Apologies for another title with an 80s musical reference. 2012 has been one of the hottest and driest on record and that has meant "wild" fires. While national attention was drawn to Colorado's blazes, I've been more drawn to reports on Oregon's largest wildfire in 150 years. This Oregonian article in particular does a great job of spelling out the politics of the fire. Was it the ranchers, the BLM, or the weather that started it? I'm not sure, but I think the consequences of the fire are intriguing.
That's because the fire has put the sage grouse at risk by burning a large chunk of prime habitat - and that matters because the sage grouse is a keystone species for emerging forms of conservation. The sage grouse is a big and beautiful bird that lives in the western United States and depends on sagebrush for habitat. The decline of the grouse, it seems, has a lot to do with habitat fragmentation cause by new energy development in the West: wind turbines, transmission lines, oil drilling, and mines. The bird does neat things like group mating calls. The grouse and its ways have been at the center of scientific-legal scandal. In 2004 the Bush administration decided it didn't need any protection, but a more recent court ruling, in 2010, noted that the decision-making proccess in that case was faulty. FWS has replied that listing the species is still "warranted" but also thinks that there are bigger fish to fry, er save, at least until 2015 when it will reconsider listing.
So the sage grouse is instead now implicated in an assortment of "new" conservation efforts that aim to pre-empt regulatory burdens in the first place. In part, these efforts stem from the fact that the bird is still a candidate species and not actually listed. In 2010, the same year Interior/FWS called for protecting, but not listing, the bird, NRCS jumped in and created the Sage Grouse Initiative, seeking to do "wildlife conservation through sustainable agriculture." SGI's voluntary approach - via conservation easements and Conservation Innovation Grants - is key. According to SGI itself, it represents an "excellent example of how NRCS is orchestrating a paradigm shift in recovery for at-risk species. Instead of regulatory burdens, the Initiative takes a voluntary approach that benefits agriculture and sage grouse – along with a suite of other wildlife species too, from pronghorn to mule deer." SGI works with ranchers to help them do things like: change grazing patterns, move fences, and remove invasives (junipers) that benefit sage grouse habitat. The hope is that the bird ultimately won't have to be listed and that rancher income can be buffered at the same time.
I'll argue that the other reason why the grouse is a model for new conservation is because of the scale of its habitat and the species's extensive range. The Willamette Partnership has thought long and hard about scaling-up habitat conservation. Along these lines, it's developed a metric for sage grouse/sagebrush, with the idea, I think, that it could be portable to any context where one might want to save sage grouse habitat. It would be much harder for a more localized endangered species like the red-bearded Jackson County lark (fictional bird) or even the fairy shrimp (real!) to get this kind of energy behind it.
Here's what I'm bringing the bird back to: I wonder what the fire can tell us about "new" conservation. For right now, I'll answer with a question: how do conservationists, agencies, ranchers, etc. account for the dynamics of ecosystems within a regulatory, or better yet, a "pre" regulatory ESA? The question certainly goes beyond assessing future climate change, though the uneven effects of climate change, like drought and fire, are undoubtedly a huge source of project risk. I think there are two specific, but interrelated kinds of questions to be asking here: how do you effectively make sage grouse habitat into a credit or unit of sale/funding and what are the rules governing the life of this mitigation credit or best management practice or whatever. I'll start with the latter question. If a rancher signs up to protect the sage grouse, but then a fire comes along and destroys the protected habitat, what do you do as a regulator? What's the rule? Hold the rancher responsible? And what if the rancher had already sold credits to a developer making an impact elsewhere? Is the developer responsible (they would be in TMDL mitigation, but not 404)? In the end, part of the answer is: well whose fault was it anyway? But as the Long Draw fire shows, that's not an easy question to answer.
There's more than a question of liability here too. How do you create a non-linear or a non-equilibrium currency, one that accredits changes in ecosystem states over time? Or do you? As a regulator you probably want verifiable results of sage grouse protection, preferably with a 5-10 year timespan because you are operating within a legal climate that calls for the bird's protection. So you might prefer a set of performance standards that asks for no fire on the conservation site. That sort of conservation might not look like the kind The Society for Sage (fictional) might ask for. That group might say, well fire is a regular component of the sage ecosystem. A rancher might then reply, how can I be certain that fire is going to give me all the sagebrush I need to sell credits?
That's a completely fictional conversation, but a Willamette Partnership report on biodiversity markets raises several of the questions I've asked here. What's clear is that there's going to have to be some sort of balance between what works for sage grouse/sagebrush and what works for regulators and what works for conservationists and what works for ranchers and the politics of that tradeoff will be interesting to watch as climate change burns on all around us.
That's because the fire has put the sage grouse at risk by burning a large chunk of prime habitat - and that matters because the sage grouse is a keystone species for emerging forms of conservation. The sage grouse is a big and beautiful bird that lives in the western United States and depends on sagebrush for habitat. The decline of the grouse, it seems, has a lot to do with habitat fragmentation cause by new energy development in the West: wind turbines, transmission lines, oil drilling, and mines. The bird does neat things like group mating calls. The grouse and its ways have been at the center of scientific-legal scandal. In 2004 the Bush administration decided it didn't need any protection, but a more recent court ruling, in 2010, noted that the decision-making proccess in that case was faulty. FWS has replied that listing the species is still "warranted" but also thinks that there are bigger fish to fry, er save, at least until 2015 when it will reconsider listing.
So the sage grouse is instead now implicated in an assortment of "new" conservation efforts that aim to pre-empt regulatory burdens in the first place. In part, these efforts stem from the fact that the bird is still a candidate species and not actually listed. In 2010, the same year Interior/FWS called for protecting, but not listing, the bird, NRCS jumped in and created the Sage Grouse Initiative, seeking to do "wildlife conservation through sustainable agriculture." SGI's voluntary approach - via conservation easements and Conservation Innovation Grants - is key. According to SGI itself, it represents an "excellent example of how NRCS is orchestrating a paradigm shift in recovery for at-risk species. Instead of regulatory burdens, the Initiative takes a voluntary approach that benefits agriculture and sage grouse – along with a suite of other wildlife species too, from pronghorn to mule deer." SGI works with ranchers to help them do things like: change grazing patterns, move fences, and remove invasives (junipers) that benefit sage grouse habitat. The hope is that the bird ultimately won't have to be listed and that rancher income can be buffered at the same time.
I'll argue that the other reason why the grouse is a model for new conservation is because of the scale of its habitat and the species's extensive range. The Willamette Partnership has thought long and hard about scaling-up habitat conservation. Along these lines, it's developed a metric for sage grouse/sagebrush, with the idea, I think, that it could be portable to any context where one might want to save sage grouse habitat. It would be much harder for a more localized endangered species like the red-bearded Jackson County lark (fictional bird) or even the fairy shrimp (real!) to get this kind of energy behind it.
Here's what I'm bringing the bird back to: I wonder what the fire can tell us about "new" conservation. For right now, I'll answer with a question: how do conservationists, agencies, ranchers, etc. account for the dynamics of ecosystems within a regulatory, or better yet, a "pre" regulatory ESA? The question certainly goes beyond assessing future climate change, though the uneven effects of climate change, like drought and fire, are undoubtedly a huge source of project risk. I think there are two specific, but interrelated kinds of questions to be asking here: how do you effectively make sage grouse habitat into a credit or unit of sale/funding and what are the rules governing the life of this mitigation credit or best management practice or whatever. I'll start with the latter question. If a rancher signs up to protect the sage grouse, but then a fire comes along and destroys the protected habitat, what do you do as a regulator? What's the rule? Hold the rancher responsible? And what if the rancher had already sold credits to a developer making an impact elsewhere? Is the developer responsible (they would be in TMDL mitigation, but not 404)? In the end, part of the answer is: well whose fault was it anyway? But as the Long Draw fire shows, that's not an easy question to answer.
There's more than a question of liability here too. How do you create a non-linear or a non-equilibrium currency, one that accredits changes in ecosystem states over time? Or do you? As a regulator you probably want verifiable results of sage grouse protection, preferably with a 5-10 year timespan because you are operating within a legal climate that calls for the bird's protection. So you might prefer a set of performance standards that asks for no fire on the conservation site. That sort of conservation might not look like the kind The Society for Sage (fictional) might ask for. That group might say, well fire is a regular component of the sage ecosystem. A rancher might then reply, how can I be certain that fire is going to give me all the sagebrush I need to sell credits?
That's a completely fictional conversation, but a Willamette Partnership report on biodiversity markets raises several of the questions I've asked here. What's clear is that there's going to have to be some sort of balance between what works for sage grouse/sagebrush and what works for regulators and what works for conservationists and what works for ranchers and the politics of that tradeoff will be interesting to watch as climate change burns on all around us.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Lucky lizards: the Texas Conservation Plan
In a previous post, I talked about how landmanagers and developers can now trade USFWS-certified credits representing the conservation of threatened, but not yet ESA-listed, species habitat. I gave a fictional example of a southern Oregon farmer, John Johnson, getting credit for planting habitat for the red-bearded Jackson County song lark. I pointed to a recent FWS rule allowing for these sorts of schemes, but beyond the tale of Farmer John and some related Clean Water Act-focused pre-compliance mitigation projects, I was in short supply of real world examples.
Then I heard about Texas's Dune Sagebrush Lizard (DSL). I'm trying to sift through a recent report from Ecosystem Marketplace on efforts to protect the DSL before the FWS lists it. About a year ago, the Texas Legislature authorized the Comptroller of Public Accounts to establish and oversee pre-compliance species habitat conservation programs, better known as Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances (CCAAs). What the heck is a Comptroller of Public Accounts, you ask? The Comptroller's mission is to "Keep Texas First" by watching and responding to federal regulations that harm Texas businesses. Indeed, the stated goal of the legislation, Senate Bill 1, was to balance conservation with Texas's economic needs, and in the case of the DSL, that means the Texas Oil and Gas Association and ranchers. The TCP's steering committee is more or less stacked with those who have interests in either developing oil and gas wells or raising livestock in the DSL's native habitat.
On behalf of the group, Comptroller Susan Combs wrote in during the public comment period on the TCP. She wrote that listing the DSL - with little science available to justify such a move - would come at the expense of Texas's biggest oil producing region: "I am emphatically against the FWS listing the DSL as an endangered species as there is not yet enough scientific data to support such a determination. We do not yet have baseline population data for the species." Either way, Texas was ready for the feds, and that was the impetus for the TCP: "However, it was absolutely critical that our state be prepared for a possible listing decision for the DSL." Coombs ends by suggesting that the TCP could be a model nationally for FWS.
Ultimately, because of the TCP, FWS decided not to list the DSL as endangered. FWS decided against listing after finding something like 88% of the DSL's habitat, including the energy-rich Permian basin in Texas, would be under some form of protection. Here's how the TCP works: landowners can choose to enroll, confidentially, in the TCP by deciding what practices they would like to do, including managing grazing or removing invasive brush. Indeed, "most of the conservation practices called for in the TCP are already common agricultural practice." Landowners can also drop out at anytime. However, the plan does require oil and gas developers to mitigate for DSL impacts.
This is where the credits come in. Oil and gas companies can contract with landowners to enhance DSL habitat or they can even contribute to species tracking efforts. I'm not sure who goes about making sure that the energy firms' impacts square with what benefits the ranchers bring - measurement and enforcement certainly weren't prominent features in anything I read from the Comptroller. They are in the Plan itself, however, as the Ecosystem Marketplace article's author, Jemma Denny, notes. She draws out some of the big difficulties with the TCP. No one really knows much about what the lizard needs, which gives the TCP steering committee leeway in being loose about what it requires itself to do. First, unlike other species banking schemes, long-term conservation easements aren't required. Second, there really aren't any specific "Conservation Measures" that link up impacts with benefits to ensure no net loss mitigation. No one knows how many lizards can be saved by removing invasive brush or restoring habitat at old drilling pads. Ultimately, the TCP, especially the trading mitigation credits part, is really a shot in the dark.
But here's what I'm bringing it back to: In my previous post on pre-compliance banking I got a little philosophical - I pondered what CCAAs mean for environmental governance. One of the things I noted in particular was that pre-compliance banking didn't really mean regulatory relief for agencies - they'd likely still have to be drawn into verifying some measure of habitat. And those making habitat impacts would still be under some sort of pressure from the feds. To be overly vulgar about it, in pre-compliance banking FWS is still holding a gun to impacters' heads: you've got to comply, ESA listing or no, or take your chances.
After reading up on the DSL, I think my rough conclusions need nuancing. What the TCP shows us about pre-regulatory banking is, in general, that context is important. It matters that the DSL lives in a state where rich energy companies hold a lot of sway and where the state government is distrustful of federal regulation. More specifically, TCP shows us that regulatory relief is always a matter of relief for whom? For the oil and gas companies, for sure, if they can get away with what looks to be a framework for spotty conservation. It's relief even for the FWS, if they don't have to go through the hassle of a listing, and don't care about upholding rigorous conservation measures. Instead, I wonder what developers' and agencies' relief dumps off on to in the end? Whether the lizards can get relief from fracking is the real question.
Then I heard about Texas's Dune Sagebrush Lizard (DSL). I'm trying to sift through a recent report from Ecosystem Marketplace on efforts to protect the DSL before the FWS lists it. About a year ago, the Texas Legislature authorized the Comptroller of Public Accounts to establish and oversee pre-compliance species habitat conservation programs, better known as Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances (CCAAs). What the heck is a Comptroller of Public Accounts, you ask? The Comptroller's mission is to "Keep Texas First" by watching and responding to federal regulations that harm Texas businesses. Indeed, the stated goal of the legislation, Senate Bill 1, was to balance conservation with Texas's economic needs, and in the case of the DSL, that means the Texas Oil and Gas Association and ranchers. The TCP's steering committee is more or less stacked with those who have interests in either developing oil and gas wells or raising livestock in the DSL's native habitat.
On behalf of the group, Comptroller Susan Combs wrote in during the public comment period on the TCP. She wrote that listing the DSL - with little science available to justify such a move - would come at the expense of Texas's biggest oil producing region: "I am emphatically against the FWS listing the DSL as an endangered species as there is not yet enough scientific data to support such a determination. We do not yet have baseline population data for the species." Either way, Texas was ready for the feds, and that was the impetus for the TCP: "However, it was absolutely critical that our state be prepared for a possible listing decision for the DSL." Coombs ends by suggesting that the TCP could be a model nationally for FWS.
Ultimately, because of the TCP, FWS decided not to list the DSL as endangered. FWS decided against listing after finding something like 88% of the DSL's habitat, including the energy-rich Permian basin in Texas, would be under some form of protection. Here's how the TCP works: landowners can choose to enroll, confidentially, in the TCP by deciding what practices they would like to do, including managing grazing or removing invasive brush. Indeed, "most of the conservation practices called for in the TCP are already common agricultural practice." Landowners can also drop out at anytime. However, the plan does require oil and gas developers to mitigate for DSL impacts.
This is where the credits come in. Oil and gas companies can contract with landowners to enhance DSL habitat or they can even contribute to species tracking efforts. I'm not sure who goes about making sure that the energy firms' impacts square with what benefits the ranchers bring - measurement and enforcement certainly weren't prominent features in anything I read from the Comptroller. They are in the Plan itself, however, as the Ecosystem Marketplace article's author, Jemma Denny, notes. She draws out some of the big difficulties with the TCP. No one really knows much about what the lizard needs, which gives the TCP steering committee leeway in being loose about what it requires itself to do. First, unlike other species banking schemes, long-term conservation easements aren't required. Second, there really aren't any specific "Conservation Measures" that link up impacts with benefits to ensure no net loss mitigation. No one knows how many lizards can be saved by removing invasive brush or restoring habitat at old drilling pads. Ultimately, the TCP, especially the trading mitigation credits part, is really a shot in the dark.
But here's what I'm bringing it back to: In my previous post on pre-compliance banking I got a little philosophical - I pondered what CCAAs mean for environmental governance. One of the things I noted in particular was that pre-compliance banking didn't really mean regulatory relief for agencies - they'd likely still have to be drawn into verifying some measure of habitat. And those making habitat impacts would still be under some sort of pressure from the feds. To be overly vulgar about it, in pre-compliance banking FWS is still holding a gun to impacters' heads: you've got to comply, ESA listing or no, or take your chances.
After reading up on the DSL, I think my rough conclusions need nuancing. What the TCP shows us about pre-regulatory banking is, in general, that context is important. It matters that the DSL lives in a state where rich energy companies hold a lot of sway and where the state government is distrustful of federal regulation. More specifically, TCP shows us that regulatory relief is always a matter of relief for whom? For the oil and gas companies, for sure, if they can get away with what looks to be a framework for spotty conservation. It's relief even for the FWS, if they don't have to go through the hassle of a listing, and don't care about upholding rigorous conservation measures. Instead, I wonder what developers' and agencies' relief dumps off on to in the end? Whether the lizards can get relief from fracking is the real question.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Her name is Rio and she accounts for natural capital
So apparently a bunch of world leaders got together a couple weeks ago to figure out how to save the world from complete ecological and social collapse. The Rio+20 United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development in Brzail brought together conservationists, select heads of state (notably, not US President Obama), and protesters to negotiate how to fund and govern development, particularly with respect to the environmental aspects of development. Environmentalists hyped the summit as THE opportunity for governments to come to some some sort of binding agreement chock full of actions that would build upon Rio 1992's controversial, but visionary Agenda 21.
And of course that didn't happen. Recent conferences of the save-the-world type (e.g. Copenhagen, Durban, Cancun with maybe the exception of REDD+) have been disappointments to a lot of folks - they just haven't gotten anything done (and even when they do, like with REDD+, it's not often with much consensus from important communities).At the same time, there's probably a good set of people who probably didn't expect much anyway, especially since, as the conference date approached, it was clear to many the draft text was going to be weak.
I don't see much value in repeating lamentations of Rio, so I'll try to dig into the significance of the conference, good or bad. From what I can tell, those who followed Rio closely, or had to see it succeed anyway like the UN, did not see it as a total failure. (Though Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was on the defensive when, summarizing the conference, he had to say: "“Let me be clear. Rio+20 was a success” There were a host of agreements ("silver linings" of Rio's failure), for example, on oceans, renewable energy funding for developing countries, and mass transit. But the UN's own wrap-up on the conference is pretty telling. The agreements on oceans, energy, and transit aren't on there. Gender equity makes it way into a short paragraph after the major highlights. The highlights, instead, form a suite of agreements on "how the green economy can be used as a tool to achieve sustainable development;vpromoting corporate sustainability reporting measures; taking steps to go beyond gross domestic product to assess the well-being of a country; developing a strategy for sustainable development financing" In other words, agreements on "natural capital accounting" (which I'll abbreviate to NCA).
What is natural capital accounting? The idea is to include the benefits that ecosystems provide to humans into all the standard national (e.g. GDP) and corporate accounting systems, so as to encourage the investment in and management of typical of other kinds of "capital", like factories. Oh, you mean make markets in nature? Nay, responds Rachel Kyte from the World Bank,"we are not talking about "pricing" nature but "valuing" it. By valuing it, you are enabling better economic decisions." For Pavan Sukhdev, star of TEEB, it's similarly: "You cannot manage what you do not measure" These champions of the natural capital approach certainly saw Rio as a success for their agenda. Their respective initiatives, the World Bank's Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) and Sukhdev's The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, seemed to made a splash at Rio. WAVES in particular led an effort to get the leaders of 50 nations and 50 businesses to sign on to a campaign to, well I'm not entirely sure since it's another one of those vague "agreements", but the idea is that these countries and companies will work to develop the scientific, policy and market infrastructure necessary to incorporate the "value" of nature into their accounting books. They got their 50 nations (58), but notably, they got more businesses - 86.
It's hard to argue in principal against trying to understand the condition of environments and the importance of their contribution to society. But what does it mean to value nature, that is, put a number - and in particular, a dollar sign - on nature? It certainly is not a cure-all. Notice how Sukhdev's quote above is so reminiscent of famed statistician Lord Kelvin's: "When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." But as geographer Ryan Galt notes in one of his articles, summoning Jacob Viner, "When you can measure it, when you can express it in numbers, your knowledge is still of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind."(Jacob Viner in Galt 2011, cited in Sayer, 1992, 175, from Berelson and Steiner, 1964). The "unsatisfaction" here could be any number of things, but for many, it's that the line between value and price is not a clear as Kyte would have us believe. As certain folks have known for a while now, money is both a measure of values, but also a means of circulation. TAt the same time money expresses the value of, say, your house, it is a means for circulating capital across the world so that when Wall Street crashes and the flow of money slows, so too does the value of your house tank. Or as UK non-profit World Development Movement wrote in response to Kyte, the value of a coral reef gets wrapped up in investors' need to circulate money to where it is most profitable, which may not be the reef, and with negative implications for the poor. It's worth quoting at length from their response to Kyte's post:
And as for the idea that reducing conservation decisions to a financial cost-benefit analysis will lead to better government decision-making, it is wholly possible that the opposite may occur. For example, we already know that coral reefs can protect coastlines from storm surges – but if we express this in a dollar figure, the implication is that it is acceptable to trash it if the profit opportunities are sufficiently high. And this kind of simplistic utilitarianism ignores the fact that, to further develop your example of the coral reef, the benefits of destroying the reef are likely to accrue to investors rather than the poor, who are often the most dependent on free natural resources. So a government or private company may decide to let the reef die because the overall monetary return of preserving it is less, ignoring the fact that the people impacted by the decision will be the poorest.
Does the back and forth between the pro-valuers and the opposition the WDM represents even matter? Is NCA even a thing or just the brightest star to come out of a lackluster conference? And what does it signify for global environmental governance? What does it mean for someone like the fictional landowner I keep referring to on this blog, working in southern Oregon to protect the fictional red-bearded Jackson County lark?
Coming up:
The changing geography of coal in the US: mining, export, and restoration in the West
A follow-up on habitat conservation banking: the Texas Conservation Plan
And of course that didn't happen. Recent conferences of the save-the-world type (e.g. Copenhagen, Durban, Cancun with maybe the exception of REDD+) have been disappointments to a lot of folks - they just haven't gotten anything done (and even when they do, like with REDD+, it's not often with much consensus from important communities).At the same time, there's probably a good set of people who probably didn't expect much anyway, especially since, as the conference date approached, it was clear to many the draft text was going to be weak.
I don't see much value in repeating lamentations of Rio, so I'll try to dig into the significance of the conference, good or bad. From what I can tell, those who followed Rio closely, or had to see it succeed anyway like the UN, did not see it as a total failure. (Though Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was on the defensive when, summarizing the conference, he had to say: "“Let me be clear. Rio+20 was a success” There were a host of agreements ("silver linings" of Rio's failure), for example, on oceans, renewable energy funding for developing countries, and mass transit. But the UN's own wrap-up on the conference is pretty telling. The agreements on oceans, energy, and transit aren't on there. Gender equity makes it way into a short paragraph after the major highlights. The highlights, instead, form a suite of agreements on "how the green economy can be used as a tool to achieve sustainable development;vpromoting corporate sustainability reporting measures; taking steps to go beyond gross domestic product to assess the well-being of a country; developing a strategy for sustainable development financing" In other words, agreements on "natural capital accounting" (which I'll abbreviate to NCA).
What is natural capital accounting? The idea is to include the benefits that ecosystems provide to humans into all the standard national (e.g. GDP) and corporate accounting systems, so as to encourage the investment in and management of typical of other kinds of "capital", like factories. Oh, you mean make markets in nature? Nay, responds Rachel Kyte from the World Bank,"we are not talking about "pricing" nature but "valuing" it. By valuing it, you are enabling better economic decisions." For Pavan Sukhdev, star of TEEB, it's similarly: "You cannot manage what you do not measure" These champions of the natural capital approach certainly saw Rio as a success for their agenda. Their respective initiatives, the World Bank's Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) and Sukhdev's The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, seemed to made a splash at Rio. WAVES in particular led an effort to get the leaders of 50 nations and 50 businesses to sign on to a campaign to, well I'm not entirely sure since it's another one of those vague "agreements", but the idea is that these countries and companies will work to develop the scientific, policy and market infrastructure necessary to incorporate the "value" of nature into their accounting books. They got their 50 nations (58), but notably, they got more businesses - 86.
It's hard to argue in principal against trying to understand the condition of environments and the importance of their contribution to society. But what does it mean to value nature, that is, put a number - and in particular, a dollar sign - on nature? It certainly is not a cure-all. Notice how Sukhdev's quote above is so reminiscent of famed statistician Lord Kelvin's: "When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." But as geographer Ryan Galt notes in one of his articles, summoning Jacob Viner, "When you can measure it, when you can express it in numbers, your knowledge is still of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind."(Jacob Viner in Galt 2011, cited in Sayer, 1992, 175, from Berelson and Steiner, 1964). The "unsatisfaction" here could be any number of things, but for many, it's that the line between value and price is not a clear as Kyte would have us believe. As certain folks have known for a while now, money is both a measure of values, but also a means of circulation. TAt the same time money expresses the value of, say, your house, it is a means for circulating capital across the world so that when Wall Street crashes and the flow of money slows, so too does the value of your house tank. Or as UK non-profit World Development Movement wrote in response to Kyte, the value of a coral reef gets wrapped up in investors' need to circulate money to where it is most profitable, which may not be the reef, and with negative implications for the poor. It's worth quoting at length from their response to Kyte's post:
And as for the idea that reducing conservation decisions to a financial cost-benefit analysis will lead to better government decision-making, it is wholly possible that the opposite may occur. For example, we already know that coral reefs can protect coastlines from storm surges – but if we express this in a dollar figure, the implication is that it is acceptable to trash it if the profit opportunities are sufficiently high. And this kind of simplistic utilitarianism ignores the fact that, to further develop your example of the coral reef, the benefits of destroying the reef are likely to accrue to investors rather than the poor, who are often the most dependent on free natural resources. So a government or private company may decide to let the reef die because the overall monetary return of preserving it is less, ignoring the fact that the people impacted by the decision will be the poorest.
Does the back and forth between the pro-valuers and the opposition the WDM represents even matter? Is NCA even a thing or just the brightest star to come out of a lackluster conference? And what does it signify for global environmental governance? What does it mean for someone like the fictional landowner I keep referring to on this blog, working in southern Oregon to protect the fictional red-bearded Jackson County lark?
I'm not entirely sure yet, but here's a first whack at it: there's probably a bit of hype to NCA. After all, natural capital was "the new political imperative" already way back when at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 10 in Nagoya (Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity - COBD - signed at Rio+0, that is...) That's where TEEB made its debut in a big way. But for NCA endeavors to make it onto center stage at THE event for sustainable development for the foreseeable future is no doubt something serious for global, high-level biodiversity conservation.
At the same time, the 50/50 campaign is no Protocol (Kyoto or Nagoya) nor even an Agreement (Cancun) or Accord (Copenhagen). It's just that, a Campaign. And Rio's blockbuster was none of these fancy titles either, just "The Future We Want". Some might say that Rio's lack of anything in any way binding or even visionary spells the not-so-terrible end of government's role in saving the world. Maybe so. What it does show is a new era in which governments and businesses together write the visions, goals, and rules that manage environments around the world. Ultimately, what this means is that Farmer Jane protecting endangered lark habitat in Oregon is likely to come more and more into contact with the corporate world's tools for and agents of biodiversity protection (and vice versa), perhaps just as Farmer Jane once upon a time came more and more linked to agro-businesses for farm inputs. It'll be interesting to follow those encounters.
At the same time, the 50/50 campaign is no Protocol (Kyoto or Nagoya) nor even an Agreement (Cancun) or Accord (Copenhagen). It's just that, a Campaign. And Rio's blockbuster was none of these fancy titles either, just "The Future We Want". Some might say that Rio's lack of anything in any way binding or even visionary spells the not-so-terrible end of government's role in saving the world. Maybe so. What it does show is a new era in which governments and businesses together write the visions, goals, and rules that manage environments around the world. Ultimately, what this means is that Farmer Jane protecting endangered lark habitat in Oregon is likely to come more and more into contact with the corporate world's tools for and agents of biodiversity protection (and vice versa), perhaps just as Farmer Jane once upon a time came more and more linked to agro-businesses for farm inputs. It'll be interesting to follow those encounters.
Coming up:
The changing geography of coal in the US: mining, export, and restoration in the West
A follow-up on habitat conservation banking: the Texas Conservation Plan
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)