Restoring climatized ecosystem services for the market: Part 1

In the foothills of the Cascades in western Oregon, a landowner contracts with a local firm that will restore a stream that runs through her property. Among other things, they'll plant trees to shade the stream during those cloudless Oregon summer days and the restoration company will throw some logs in there to create habitat for salmon and other creatures. The trees might take 20 years to grow to the point where they're really shading the stream, but the logs will work more quickly. The landowner restores the stream with the help of payments from a local water utility that is under state and federal pressure to mitigate for the impact its effluent has on stream temperature, and consequently the salmon that like the water cool.

Salmon are a big deal in Oregon

All the while, snowmelt from the Cascades is becoming more erratic and there's less of it, both of which spell trouble for the salmon. Because the snow has melted earlier in spring, the fall low stream flows are inching their way closer to the high temperatures of summer. The trees might cool things down a bit, but they won't be very tall for several more years. The trees may also soak up carbon dioxide and mitigate climate change in the first place, but what are 600 stems going to do for this particular watershed? These ecosystem services are what I call climatized. In short, this one attempt - on the part of a landowner and regulators - to deal with a local water temperature issue is confounded by the regionalized effects of climate change at the same time that the effort has the possibility to be part of a global solution.

How states and land managers can enhance ecosystem service provision under changing climates is a pressing issue, but it's clearly one complicated by the temporal and spatial nature of the problem. In a three part series, I want to problematize how we conceptualize climate "adaptation". In this post I discuss how regulators at local, state, and federal agencies - often the front line of climate response - might be both constrained and enabled to act on the temporal dynamism of changing climates. In the post to follow, I again ask about regulators, but ask who's responsible for, capable of, and willing to respond, focusing on the spatial nature of climate change - the differences between climate change as something globally produced and solvable, but with especially regionalized and localized effects. Finally, I look at the vulnerability of people to the effects of climate change - think increased flooding - and how ecosystem services alone - think restoration of wetlands or sand dunes - may or may not mitigate vulnerabilities.

There is certainly a literature on climate change, ecosystem services, restoration. I want to pull out three key points: 1) we really don't know how successful restoration is at developing ecosystem function; 2) changing climates will intensify ecosystem processes and make them more variable, dynamic; 3) climate change is global, but its effects are variegated - some places will fare better than others.

The question is how regulators like those in the scenario can deal with this. For starters, stream services - be it water temperature regulation, surface water storage, or sediment transport - are going to change over time as increased rainfall intensity and shifts in snowmelt timings and quantity reshape streams. In markets or payment schemes for stream restoration - where a landowner like the one we opened with gets paid by a local water utility - what happens when the service the landowner was supposed to provide no longer exists or does not function in the same way anymore because drought and higher temperatures killed off her trees? Can regulators practice adaptive management - going back and revisiting restoration projects and ask land managers to adapt them to the climate du jour? Or can regulators ask for "future-proof" designs that are meant to be resilient over time?

Newly planted trees at a stream restoration project that provides temperature offsets.

My answer is one of those typical social sciences cop-outs: it depends. Yes and no. In the yes camp: 1) in PES schemes or markets regulators get a chance to "condition" so that land managers only get to sell restoration credits if certain "performance standards" are met. Regulators may be able to make some of these standards about site performance in the face of regional climate effects. Moreover, regulators, especially after the 2008 federal rule on stream/wetland mitigation markets, can ask land managers to put aside money for a long-term endowment that will ensure the site will continue to function over time; 2) In these markets, regulators also craft the ecological assessments by which restoration sites are evaluated. They may be able to write these assessments in such a way to "future-proof" restoration, by encouraging restorationists to design streams that are adaptable to changing climates. The authors of a draft stream assessment in Oregon, for instance, want to assess ecological functions as a way of gaging how over time, a site will perform. This is an improvement on how most assessments currently operate, but it raises the question of how to "future-proof" restoration to "unknown unknowns" of climate change. In other words, functions-based assessment provides a good deal of insurance for the future, but it does not necessarily give regulators the authority, 15 years later, to go back and ask land managers to plant more trees, put in more logs, or do something completely different. Most of the times, they're off the hook after 5-10 years.

In the no camp, I only want to point out that any sort of planning for future ecological conditions always presents a challenge because it leaves agencies open to litigation from those who will say, "you can't ask us to do that." In much the same way that agencies are more or less limited in what offsite factors - think upstream sedimentation - they can ask restorationists to account for, they will be constrained in asking land managers to think about the future. These markets are mitigation markets, where restorationists are supposed to provide "ecological uplift" in a similar kind and degree of impact elsewhere, like when a landowner plants riparian trees to cool streams that have been warmed by effluent from a municipal wastewater plant. And so as long as the landowner can cool the same amount of kcals/day of water that the plant is adding to the system, they are ok. Whether they also provide salmon habitat, refugia for climate affected species, etc., is another question. Subsidy payment schemes may have different, potentially more encompassing, criteria. Moreover, as practitioners know, incorporating "ecosystem services" into official regulatory practice is not an easy project. It's not a straightforward term, and it's not in any statute, and it can become another thing restorationists would point to and say, "what is that and why do we have to do it?"

What it all comes back to is that already existing markets in ecosystem services may or may not be responsive to climate change. At this point, you might be thinking, "this sounds like a lot of 'depends'!" That's my point. The ways that regulators are going to respond to climate effects in markets for streams, wetlands, species, etc. is going to depend on: 1) what level of government they're working in. Federal authorities may have powers that local governments don't - and vice versa; 2) it'll depend on where they're working - Oregon environmental agencies have had different institutional responses to emerging issues like climate than, say, Texas. I'll take up this spatial/scalar unevenness of regulation in more detail in my next post.

Code/Nature

I've posted the slides from a presentation I gave at the Dimensions of Political Ecology conference here at the University of Kentucky recently. My argument is pretty straightforward: to have an ecosystem service, like wetland water storage and delay, you have to be able to show where it that service exists in the landscape and software tools like Excel, ArcGIS, and online mapping utilities are really fundamental to that calculation. It's kind of like the old thought experiment - if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does a wetland provide a flood mitigation service if it is in the middle of nowhere? I don't mean to get all philosophical on you, but the basic point is that ecosystem services - as valuable benefits of nature to society - might not exist as such if environmental agencies and others weren't able to map where they exist and who they benefit. So, the talk is a modest call to pay attention to regulatory, entrepreneurial, and conservationist exercises in mapping services, like InVEST from the Natural Capital Project. I've pasted the text of the talk below; each paragraph corresponds with one slide.

DOPE 2013 presentation_Eric Nost_Code/Nature from ericnost

1. Ok, so I promise you that this picture of people idling in line to get tickets at the Portland airport is relevant to what I really want to talk to you about today: market valuation of ecosystem services. I’m going to show that airport terminals, in fact share a lot in common with the restoration sites through which Oregon conservationists and entrepreneurs value ecosystem services for market. I make two calls in my talk: 1, for ecosystem services researchers to pay attention to spatially explicit ECS valuation, and to ask for whom such valuations work. 2, to call upon political ecologists to keep paying attention to spatial visualization techniques, but to also pay attention to other technologies through which spaces – like airport terminals, and restoration sites - are made and valued.

2. Welcome to the Half Mile Lane site in exurban Portland, Oregon. It provides a number of ECS. The wetland you see stores and delays water, which mitigates flood impacts for downstream homes. The stream, which you can’t really see, provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range. A couple of years ago, state environmental agencies and conservationists undertook ecological restoration on the site, turning old farmland and a straightened ditch into a productive wetland and stream.

3.That these services exist as services is spatially dependent, or contextual. I’ll give you three quick quotes to show how. As you see here, the international think-tank for ecosystem services accounting, TEEB, note that you have to have a specific site to have a service. The work of the wetland at HML to store and delay water matters only because there are homes in the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site that benefit.

4. Long-time ECS researcher Gretchen Daily concurs. She calls for focusing on the right places in the landscape. HML’s position, for instance, allows it to slow down and cycle the increased runoff from logging operations.

5.Finally, lest you think this focus on landscapes is the domain solely of pundits like TEEB and Daily, consider what the Oregon DSL has to say. One phrase we often hear in the ECS world – we did in the TEEB quote - is “value of nature”. What does value mean? For DSL, it means the opportunity to provide an ecological function. Crucially, this opportunity is location-based.

6. Now, DSL oversees wetland and stream ECS markets in OR. The way these markets work is entrepreneurs restore ECS on sites like HML and sell the ecological benefit they create, as a credit commodity, to housing developers, DOTs, and others that are paving over wetlands and streams in different parts of the watershed. In fact, HML here is one such mitigation “bank” of restoration credits. There many different kinds of actors in the market. You’ve got state agencies like DSL with statutory obligations and ecological inclinations, but also NGO groups with conservation missions, and of course entrepreneurs looking to do banking for profit. This raises a key question: to what extent do market-makers account for context, or value? Or for them, is a service just a service, no matter where it’s provided? How do market actors decide where it is most ecologically valuable to do restoration?

7. What I want to show in the rest of the talk are three things:
1. Digital tools like Excel and GIS allow the OR market to account for context
2. However, these tools and the algorithms that underwrite them are not mirrors of nature. Rather, tools reflect the interests of market actors
3. In Oregon, state agencies and conservationists may have the upper hand in defining and accounting for ECS values.
I make these arguments by outlining three moments in which value is accounted for in OR’s markets. I end by putting out a couple of calls for future research.

8.I’ll tell you first about the assessment moment of ecosystem services valuation in Oregon’s wetland and stream markets. Entrepreneurs hire consultants to do a key part of the work of the market: assess restoration success. In assessment, consultants utilize Excel spreadsheet-based calculators of ecological process. One of these calculators is called the Oregon Rapid Wetlands Assessment Protocol, or ORWAP. There are ones for salmon habitat, water temperature, and other services, but they’re all conceptually very similar, so I’ll focus on ORWAP. Most of them were in fact written by the same person, under contract from DSL and US EPA. He’s been developing these assessments for about 30 years now, which is when he first made a split in assessing ecological process or function, and value.

9.Consultants score functions in ORWAP through a series of multiple choice questions about things like seasonal surface water extent.

10. Consultants also do work in the office, employing several online mapping tools for an assessment of value. Here’s one called Oregon Explorer. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site. OR Explorer knows, too, about rare species on the site. It’s bringing a lot of data from beyond the boundaries of the site together, and showing it to the user in one frame. The user can thus answer questions in ORWAP about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area.

11. What offsite stressors, and risks consultants find in their assessment, regulators can consider in approving or denying a banker’s plan. For instance, regulators often focus on reed canary grass, an invasive species that can spread rapidly on a restoration site from without and foil the project. They question whether a site and its landscape surroundings will, in the end, prove valuable if there is too much RCG around. Theoretically environmental agencies can in this moment deny a banker’s proposal to work on a certain piece of ground that is particularly susceptible to weeds. In reality, however, they are more likely to just modify the banker’s site selection, perhaps by asking them to put more money into a long-term management.

12. Finally, there is a market moment to value’s measure. What conservationists want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, to get their credits to sell, the amount they get depends in large part on the location of their project. They would get the full amount if they were in what’s called a priority area and less if they were not.

13. These areas are an aggregation of habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and put together by TNC. To be clear: this isn’t how the market currently works, but regulators do use GIS to look at whether bankers are siting in priority areas, and conservationists are pushing for this trading ratio protocol to be adopted.

14. The problem is that if a banker had to do work in a priority area lest they not get as many credits as expected, that could be at least a short-term constraint to the market, especially if land prices in priority areas were higher. In general, through all these moments, how state agencies, with help from conservationists, want to assess value via site selection, will constrain entrepreneurs. At the same time, agencies and conservationists are not now fully determining site selection. Rather, the maps they make give them something to point to and say, bankers should go here rather than there. Or, in other cases, spreadsheets like ORWAP in tandem with maps let them say, look there’s a quarry upstream, don’t go there.

15. The state and conservationists will want these gestures to be assertive. What underwrites their ability to point to a map in the first place? In large part, code. I want to turn quickly to work in information technology studies as a way of understanding valuation in OR. Recently, geographers Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge wrote a book called Code/Space in which they argued that spaces are increasingly constituted by computer code. An airport terminal is only the kind of space it is if the 0s and 1s that run the check-in stations work; when they crash, the space turns from a hub of international commerce into a den of frustration. In the same way, a restoration site or classes of ecosystems cannot be priority spaces if the software that codes them that way does not work the way it is supposed to. In OR, the ability of ArcGIS to display and combine layers is crucial because layers allow for combining different ecological interests into priorities. Code underwrites how web mapping utilities aggregate different data and draw circles around it as well, allowing foroffsite visualization and valorization. And ORWAP can’t generate a value score without Excel’s ability to run calculations across so many different variables. The state/conservationists’ position is code-dependent.

16.So to wrap-up: Yes, markets in ecosystem services restoration, at least in OR, do have a spatial calculus of value, as TEBB and Gretchen Daily hope for. State agencies and conservationists work to make the calculation their own, and deploy it to their own ends. But it remains unclear how successful they can be. Their ability to write the code and utilizing the tools with which they see value in space will be crucial to their future market-making work.

17. And valuation tools will be worthwhile pay attention in other markets as well, as decision-makers continue to call for the price valuation and marketization of ECS. So ECS researchers should continue looking at the work of spatially explicit valuation, but ask, as Norgaard did, for whom does ECS governance work for? Conservationists? Regulators? Bankers? … Landowners? PEists are indeed well equipped to talk about winners and losers. But this is also a call to PEists to keep looking at code. We’ve looked at spatial visualization technologies before, but need to continue, and to look at code not just in GIS but in Excel and other programs. We can do this in partnership with scholars of the geoweb.

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.

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

Ecosystem services justice?

"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?

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?

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.

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.