I've been working for the past couple of years at the University of Kentucky on my master's thesis. Building from a bigger NSF-funded project on stream mitigation banking, my research has argued that market planning and design for wetland and stream ecosystem services in Oregon has not been as easy a task as some pundits might think it, nor has it as of yet been as devastating as others might imagine it. The thesis is available here:
http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/9/
I'll be moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to carry on with the Ph.D. I look forward to keep exploring and communicating how market environmental law and policy is (not) equipped to account for climate change and its effects on ecosystem services.
Showing posts with label political ecology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political ecology. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Friday, July 19, 2013
Optimal natures
Recently, the Natural Capital Project released its new tool for watershed-based ecosystem services decision-making, the Resource Investment Optimization System, or RIOS (spanish for rivers). It builds on InVEST, NCP's tool for mapping and valuing all sorts of services. Where InVEST could tell you for instance where to invest in a watershed to achieve the best water quality gains (efficiency), RIOS is geared to help you decide between different sets of investment (optimization).
RIOS joins a fast-growing cadre of other ecosystem services decision-making software tools. A short list includes:
Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SOLVES) - the USGS's tool of choice
Integrated Water Resources planning suite - led by the Army Corps of Engineers
Simple and Effective Resource for Valuing Ecosystem Services (SERVES) - from Earth Economics
i-Tree - USFS built this one
ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES)
These models literally instantiate ecosystem services as a framework by providing the means for framing services - ES is a framework for understanding tradeoffs in managing nature and here are the algorithms for modeling them. One of the key points the tools have in common is that they are spatially-explicit; what might distinguish them is whether they aim to inform either investment or policy decisions. Or, since ecosystem service policy tends toward treating nature as always already an investment (or lack thereof), the distinction is probably: what kind of investment (public or private)?
These tools parallel a number of data analytics firms working with so-called Big Data on the environment. Many, like Cloudera and Ayasdi work with oil and gas companies to visualize optimize the use of their drilling equipment, in the name of preventing future environmental catastrophes. Others, like Remsoft's suite of tools aim to improve forestry practices by incorporating extensive data on tree health, location, etc. - Google and Microsoft are working on similar software for "seeing the trees and the forest."
In short, the stated goal of these models is to "optimize" environmental management, which, for many of them, also means optimizing business practice. Is there a difference between optimal and efficient? For some, maybe not. But Remsoft's tools, they claim, allow you to "understand and manage the supply-demand balance, identify current and future supply chain bottlenecks, manage production and delivery capacity, forecast costs and revenues, and generate plans that stay within budget." Clearly something more than the sense of efficiency as input/output is going on here. Indeed, optimization, in the language of mathematics and computer programming, means to choose the best from among several alternatives given a particular criteria. Yes, the criterion for Remsoft might be $, but that may or may not be the case for USFS's community forestry tool, i-Tree.
Where does all this talk of optimization come from? That's hard to say, and 600 pg. tomes have been written about it. But there is a curious perpendicular conversation happening in the weird realm of biology, computer programming, and artificial intelligence themselves meet: where NCP, Remsoft, and others want to optimize nature, these researchers think nature optimizes. They "use and abuse" evolutionary concepts (note: optimization is not necessarily about selection pressure) as metaphor for informing tech design, their goals ranging from the everyday to the lethal. Researchers have found that ants respond to disaster and disruption - to their environment - in ways that may inform optimal transmission of information over internet protocols. The US military has enrolled apiologists to use bee swarms as an analogue for drone maneuvering. The goal, of course, being to optimize surveillance and kill rates. What brings together the "optimize nature" modelers and the "nature optimizes" researchers and designers is the idea that the environment serves as a model for our treatment of it.
This is not to get us lost in the thickets of environmental philosophy or social theory. The question is: on the ground, what is lost and gained by thinking in terms of optimizing ecosystem services? Who stands to win and lose? These models are meant to inform land use decisions, and in doing so, they help to bring about the optimized world they only purport to represent. If you model it, they will come. In this performance, the way the models are programmed matters. And what differences are there between the flavor of optimization led by the conservationists using NCP and the timber managers using Remsoft's Spatial Optimizer? One has to inform policy, the other business - can optimization serve as an adequate guiding concept for both?
RIOS joins a fast-growing cadre of other ecosystem services decision-making software tools. A short list includes:
Social Values for Ecosystem Services (SOLVES) - the USGS's tool of choice
Integrated Water Resources planning suite - led by the Army Corps of Engineers
Simple and Effective Resource for Valuing Ecosystem Services (SERVES) - from Earth Economics
i-Tree - USFS built this one
ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES)
These models literally instantiate ecosystem services as a framework by providing the means for framing services - ES is a framework for understanding tradeoffs in managing nature and here are the algorithms for modeling them. One of the key points the tools have in common is that they are spatially-explicit; what might distinguish them is whether they aim to inform either investment or policy decisions. Or, since ecosystem service policy tends toward treating nature as always already an investment (or lack thereof), the distinction is probably: what kind of investment (public or private)?
These tools parallel a number of data analytics firms working with so-called Big Data on the environment. Many, like Cloudera and Ayasdi work with oil and gas companies to visualize optimize the use of their drilling equipment, in the name of preventing future environmental catastrophes. Others, like Remsoft's suite of tools aim to improve forestry practices by incorporating extensive data on tree health, location, etc. - Google and Microsoft are working on similar software for "seeing the trees and the forest."
In short, the stated goal of these models is to "optimize" environmental management, which, for many of them, also means optimizing business practice. Is there a difference between optimal and efficient? For some, maybe not. But Remsoft's tools, they claim, allow you to "understand and manage the supply-demand balance, identify current and future supply chain bottlenecks, manage production and delivery capacity, forecast costs and revenues, and generate plans that stay within budget." Clearly something more than the sense of efficiency as input/output is going on here. Indeed, optimization, in the language of mathematics and computer programming, means to choose the best from among several alternatives given a particular criteria. Yes, the criterion for Remsoft might be $, but that may or may not be the case for USFS's community forestry tool, i-Tree.
Where does all this talk of optimization come from? That's hard to say, and 600 pg. tomes have been written about it. But there is a curious perpendicular conversation happening in the weird realm of biology, computer programming, and artificial intelligence themselves meet: where NCP, Remsoft, and others want to optimize nature, these researchers think nature optimizes. They "use and abuse" evolutionary concepts (note: optimization is not necessarily about selection pressure) as metaphor for informing tech design, their goals ranging from the everyday to the lethal. Researchers have found that ants respond to disaster and disruption - to their environment - in ways that may inform optimal transmission of information over internet protocols. The US military has enrolled apiologists to use bee swarms as an analogue for drone maneuvering. The goal, of course, being to optimize surveillance and kill rates. What brings together the "optimize nature" modelers and the "nature optimizes" researchers and designers is the idea that the environment serves as a model for our treatment of it.
This is not to get us lost in the thickets of environmental philosophy or social theory. The question is: on the ground, what is lost and gained by thinking in terms of optimizing ecosystem services? Who stands to win and lose? These models are meant to inform land use decisions, and in doing so, they help to bring about the optimized world they only purport to represent. If you model it, they will come. In this performance, the way the models are programmed matters. And what differences are there between the flavor of optimization led by the conservationists using NCP and the timber managers using Remsoft's Spatial Optimizer? One has to inform policy, the other business - can optimization serve as an adequate guiding concept for both?
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Measuring and Marketing Ecosystem Services, Functions, and Values in Oregon
I've linked to my presentation from the Blue/Green Economies session at the recent Association of American Geographers meeting in LA. The text of the talk is below and each paragraph corresponds to a slide. It's about how regulators, conservationists, and entrepreneurs in an ecosystem services market in Oregon are assessing the landscape ecological aspects of restoration sites. Similar to my talk on "Code/Nature," I argue that state environmental agencies like the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) and conservationists including the Willamette Partnership are pushing for stronger ways of planning for, choosing, and evaluating sites and that this may prove constraining to mitigation bankers.
1. Today I want to tell you about the social relations and spatial logics motivating environmental regulators, conservationists, and eco-entrepreneurs in Oregon plan as they choose, and evaluate where in the landscape to do wetland and stream restoration for a cap and trade-type market. I’ll show how the state’s and conservationists’ efforts to map priority locations for restoration and to point out these places to entrepreneurs are market-constraining, but perhaps only in the short-term. The takeaway here is that many of the new or revamped markets in ecosystem services we are seeing may not be about ecosystem commodification and commercialization so much as they are about state formation, power, and legitimacy.
2. Let’s start here. Welcome to the Half Mile Lane site in exurban Portland, Oregon. It provides a number of ECS.
3. The wetland you see stores and delays water, which mitigates flood impacts for downstream homes.
4. The stream provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range.
5. A couple of years ago, state environmental agencies like the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) and conservationists including the Willamette Partnership undertook ecological restoration on the site, turning old farmland and a straightened ditch into a productive wetland and stream. This work was done for a market where developers purchase offsets for impacts to wetlands and streams. HML also serves a demonstration project for what regulators and conservationists see as stronger metrics for the market, both of what counts as successful restoration, as well as what locations in the watershed are worthwhile to do restoration projects.
6. As global ECS pundit Pavan Sukhdev explains to us, these markets are supposed to be about valuing nature.
7. Well, what does that mean? For him – and we hear this quote a lot - “we cannot manage what we do not measure,” which means measuring the nature’s benefits and doing so as a $ price.
8. Price itself, however, is not an ecological measure. Lest you think the focus on “value” is the domain solely of pundits like Sukhdev, consider what the Oregon DSL – one of the environmental agencies – has to say. For DSL, it means the opportunity to provide an ecological function.
9. Importantly, this opportunity is location-based; it’s spatial, contextual, embedded.
10. HML has the opportunity to mitigate flood impacts, because it is upstream of homes
11. and downstream of logging and mining operations that increase runoff.
12. So the question is: how do Oregon’s market actors measure the value of ecosystem services? Put more concretely - where in the landscape do they plan and choose to do restoration for the market and why? Sukhdev makes the challenge of resource protection sounds so easy when he says that all that needs to be done to prevent environmental degradation is to “put a value on” nature. But the task of valuation has not been so effortless in Oregon.
In the rest of this talk I want to walk you through the assessment of restoration sites in Oregon’s market, and how they become valued as places to do restoration. There are three moments to this, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against the interests of entrepreneurs. I want to demonstrate an at least short-term strength of state agencies against entrepreneurs in constraining a kind of accumulation by restoration. New ventures in market governance may not deepen ecosystem commodification and commercialization as much as they throw up roadblocks. While these may only be short-term constraints, we should pay attention to them as potential moments where the market collapses under its own contradictions.
13. I first want to take a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how these markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, state and federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, DSL - allow developers to make up for resource degradation by compensating entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. A good example: Early last year DSL authorized the trade of four salmon habitat credits to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD).
14. DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself, where it had restored salmon habitat. Instead, it dealt THPRD ECS credits. These credits are a measure of both the quality and quantity of habitat functions “uplifted” after DSL replaced a culvert and performed other stream and wetland restoration work at HML.
15. THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell environmental regulators that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed. Note that in this case a state agency, DSL, was the one selling credits, but more often it is a private entrepreneur.
16. Either way, the idea is to ensure some kind/degree of ecological equivalence, and this is the art and science of assessment.
17. There is at once a strictly ecological assessment, which measures ecological functions on a site, but also these kinds of trade demand an assessment of the value of the ecosystem services in question. Value scores are 1-10 rankings of each function’s (e.g. water storage and delay) ability to provide some service (e.g. flood mitigation).
18. In the assessment moment, restoration bankers hire ecologically-trained consultants to use several online mapping utilities to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration.
19. Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. It’s bringing a lot of data from beyond the boundaries of the site together, and showing it to the user in one frame. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site. Consultants have to answer questions 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, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the value score of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.
20. Bankers and their consultants then have to take their scores to regulators. Agency staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment in the regulatory moment when they approve, deny, or modify a banker’s choice of where to do restoration.
21. For instance, regulators often focus on reed canary grass, an invasive species that can spread rapidly on a restoration site from without and foil a project. They question whether a site and its landscape surroundings will, in the end, prove valuable if there is too much RCG around. Environmental agencies can in this moment modify a banker’s proposal to work on a certain piece of ground that is particularly susceptible to weeds by asking them to put more money into a long-term management.
22. Bankers then finally have to sell their credits. This is a market moment to value’s measure. What non-profit conservationists like WP 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.
23. These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC.
24. The idea is that bankers would get the full amount of credits if they were doing restoration in a priority area and less if they were not. The problem is that if a banker had to do work in a priority area lest they not get as many credits as they expected, they’d be incentivized to work on land they might not normally restore. But being driven to work in priority areas would mean a narrower range of landowners they could work with. And all else equal, bankers want to work on sites where they can get the most credit bang for their restoration buck. This system means having to work on sites with higher costs of restoration and potentially higher land prices, both of which would cut into their profits.
To be clear: this isn’t how the market currently works, but regulators are using GIS to see/check whether bankers are siting in priority areas, and conservationists are pushing for this trading ratio protocol to be adopted. It is still part of the discussion on the ground in Oregon, about what the market should and will look like.
25.In general, then, through all three moments, how state agencies in Oregon - with help from the conservationists who have helped map priority areas and author market protocols - how they assess ecosystem service value in site selection proves constraining to entrepreneurs.
26. Assessment – the landscape context they have to look at weighs bankers down
27. Regulatory – bankers have to put more capital into long-term management
28. Market – they will not get full credit, have to work in different places
29. Bankers are in fact rather unhappy about this way of valorizing restoration – and question regulators’ authority to do it. It’s come to the point where entrepreneurs may take state agencies to court on the issue and stop doing more restoration for the market. And so what we see here is not the state rolling out the conditions for market success, but genuine market constraints.
30. I do want to caution that this only holds for the current political moment. We know that every crisis can become an opportunity. In the long-term, what we might see is bankers getting used to regulators’ expectations about where it is valuable to do restoration. Indeed, the way state agencies have mapped out priorities might only serve as sort of visual aids to bankers, making it easier for them to find sites. This would facilitate the commodification and commercialization of ecosystem restoration and provide more opportunities for developers to just buy credits for their resource impacts.
31. And so, to wrap up, what I think this case does for us is two-fold. First, it reminds us to pay attention to the spatial logics of these markets, asking what sort of notions of spatial efficiency and prioritization constitute these markets, besides the idea that there is a difference in opportunity costs between global north and south. Kathy McAfee has called efficiency “the holy grail of environmental economics.” I agree, but I’d add that spatial efficiency, which economists would think about as equimarginality, is a similar crusade.
32. Also, while the search for value might be what makes attempts at ecosystem markets and payments look similar across the globe (Robertson 2012), this case suggests a need to keep paying attention to change over time, within specific historical-geographical contexts to see the moments where neoliberal conservation confronts its own contradictions, and what happens.
33. In the short-term, we might see moves by the state and conservationists to implement new measures of restoration success not as a deepening of commodification and commercialization, but as having the effect of slowing the market.
In the long-run, it might only enhance capitalist investment in restoration in particular places at the expense of others, in what several scholars have named as the variegation of neoliberal natures or conservation.
Either way, demarcating the difference between the two can tell us a lot how about market-oriented conservation projects succeed and fail, and to what effect.
1. Today I want to tell you about the social relations and spatial logics motivating environmental regulators, conservationists, and eco-entrepreneurs in Oregon plan as they choose, and evaluate where in the landscape to do wetland and stream restoration for a cap and trade-type market. I’ll show how the state’s and conservationists’ efforts to map priority locations for restoration and to point out these places to entrepreneurs are market-constraining, but perhaps only in the short-term. The takeaway here is that many of the new or revamped markets in ecosystem services we are seeing may not be about ecosystem commodification and commercialization so much as they are about state formation, power, and legitimacy.
2. Let’s start here. Welcome to the Half Mile Lane site in exurban Portland, Oregon. It provides a number of ECS.
3. The wetland you see stores and delays water, which mitigates flood impacts for downstream homes.
4. The stream provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range.
5. A couple of years ago, state environmental agencies like the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) and conservationists including the Willamette Partnership undertook ecological restoration on the site, turning old farmland and a straightened ditch into a productive wetland and stream. This work was done for a market where developers purchase offsets for impacts to wetlands and streams. HML also serves a demonstration project for what regulators and conservationists see as stronger metrics for the market, both of what counts as successful restoration, as well as what locations in the watershed are worthwhile to do restoration projects.
6. As global ECS pundit Pavan Sukhdev explains to us, these markets are supposed to be about valuing nature.
7. Well, what does that mean? For him – and we hear this quote a lot - “we cannot manage what we do not measure,” which means measuring the nature’s benefits and doing so as a $ price.
8. Price itself, however, is not an ecological measure. Lest you think the focus on “value” is the domain solely of pundits like Sukhdev, consider what the Oregon DSL – one of the environmental agencies – has to say. For DSL, it means the opportunity to provide an ecological function.
9. Importantly, this opportunity is location-based; it’s spatial, contextual, embedded.
10. HML has the opportunity to mitigate flood impacts, because it is upstream of homes
11. and downstream of logging and mining operations that increase runoff.
12. So the question is: how do Oregon’s market actors measure the value of ecosystem services? Put more concretely - where in the landscape do they plan and choose to do restoration for the market and why? Sukhdev makes the challenge of resource protection sounds so easy when he says that all that needs to be done to prevent environmental degradation is to “put a value on” nature. But the task of valuation has not been so effortless in Oregon.
In the rest of this talk I want to walk you through the assessment of restoration sites in Oregon’s market, and how they become valued as places to do restoration. There are three moments to this, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against the interests of entrepreneurs. I want to demonstrate an at least short-term strength of state agencies against entrepreneurs in constraining a kind of accumulation by restoration. New ventures in market governance may not deepen ecosystem commodification and commercialization as much as they throw up roadblocks. While these may only be short-term constraints, we should pay attention to them as potential moments where the market collapses under its own contradictions.
13. I first want to take a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how these markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, state and federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, DSL - allow developers to make up for resource degradation by compensating entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. A good example: Early last year DSL authorized the trade of four salmon habitat credits to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD).
14. DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself, where it had restored salmon habitat. Instead, it dealt THPRD ECS credits. These credits are a measure of both the quality and quantity of habitat functions “uplifted” after DSL replaced a culvert and performed other stream and wetland restoration work at HML.
15. THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell environmental regulators that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed. Note that in this case a state agency, DSL, was the one selling credits, but more often it is a private entrepreneur.
16. Either way, the idea is to ensure some kind/degree of ecological equivalence, and this is the art and science of assessment.
17. There is at once a strictly ecological assessment, which measures ecological functions on a site, but also these kinds of trade demand an assessment of the value of the ecosystem services in question. Value scores are 1-10 rankings of each function’s (e.g. water storage and delay) ability to provide some service (e.g. flood mitigation).
18. In the assessment moment, restoration bankers hire ecologically-trained consultants to use several online mapping utilities to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration.
19. Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. It’s bringing a lot of data from beyond the boundaries of the site together, and showing it to the user in one frame. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site. Consultants have to answer questions 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, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the value score of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.
20. Bankers and their consultants then have to take their scores to regulators. Agency staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment in the regulatory moment when they approve, deny, or modify a banker’s choice of where to do restoration.
21. For instance, regulators often focus on reed canary grass, an invasive species that can spread rapidly on a restoration site from without and foil a project. They question whether a site and its landscape surroundings will, in the end, prove valuable if there is too much RCG around. Environmental agencies can in this moment modify a banker’s proposal to work on a certain piece of ground that is particularly susceptible to weeds by asking them to put more money into a long-term management.
22. Bankers then finally have to sell their credits. This is a market moment to value’s measure. What non-profit conservationists like WP 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.
23. These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC.
24. The idea is that bankers would get the full amount of credits if they were doing restoration in a priority area and less if they were not. The problem is that if a banker had to do work in a priority area lest they not get as many credits as they expected, they’d be incentivized to work on land they might not normally restore. But being driven to work in priority areas would mean a narrower range of landowners they could work with. And all else equal, bankers want to work on sites where they can get the most credit bang for their restoration buck. This system means having to work on sites with higher costs of restoration and potentially higher land prices, both of which would cut into their profits.
To be clear: this isn’t how the market currently works, but regulators are using GIS to see/check whether bankers are siting in priority areas, and conservationists are pushing for this trading ratio protocol to be adopted. It is still part of the discussion on the ground in Oregon, about what the market should and will look like.
25.In general, then, through all three moments, how state agencies in Oregon - with help from the conservationists who have helped map priority areas and author market protocols - how they assess ecosystem service value in site selection proves constraining to entrepreneurs.
26. Assessment – the landscape context they have to look at weighs bankers down
27. Regulatory – bankers have to put more capital into long-term management
28. Market – they will not get full credit, have to work in different places
29. Bankers are in fact rather unhappy about this way of valorizing restoration – and question regulators’ authority to do it. It’s come to the point where entrepreneurs may take state agencies to court on the issue and stop doing more restoration for the market. And so what we see here is not the state rolling out the conditions for market success, but genuine market constraints.
30. I do want to caution that this only holds for the current political moment. We know that every crisis can become an opportunity. In the long-term, what we might see is bankers getting used to regulators’ expectations about where it is valuable to do restoration. Indeed, the way state agencies have mapped out priorities might only serve as sort of visual aids to bankers, making it easier for them to find sites. This would facilitate the commodification and commercialization of ecosystem restoration and provide more opportunities for developers to just buy credits for their resource impacts.
31. And so, to wrap up, what I think this case does for us is two-fold. First, it reminds us to pay attention to the spatial logics of these markets, asking what sort of notions of spatial efficiency and prioritization constitute these markets, besides the idea that there is a difference in opportunity costs between global north and south. Kathy McAfee has called efficiency “the holy grail of environmental economics.” I agree, but I’d add that spatial efficiency, which economists would think about as equimarginality, is a similar crusade.
32. Also, while the search for value might be what makes attempts at ecosystem markets and payments look similar across the globe (Robertson 2012), this case suggests a need to keep paying attention to change over time, within specific historical-geographical contexts to see the moments where neoliberal conservation confronts its own contradictions, and what happens.
33. In the short-term, we might see moves by the state and conservationists to implement new measures of restoration success not as a deepening of commodification and commercialization, but as having the effect of slowing the market.
In the long-run, it might only enhance capitalist investment in restoration in particular places at the expense of others, in what several scholars have named as the variegation of neoliberal natures or conservation.
Either way, demarcating the difference between the two can tell us a lot how about market-oriented conservation projects succeed and fail, and to what effect.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
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.
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.
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.
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