Where does the value of nature come from?

$125 trillion is no small chunk of change. You could, without a doubt, buy a lot of stuff with that in your pocket. In fact, it's more than the world's gross domestic product (GDP), or the value of all the goods and services produced in the global economy each year - everything from cars to haircuts to World Cup tickets. But according to a recent study led by Bob Costanza, $125 trillion is also the dollar equivalent of what all the work the world's ecosystems do for us - things that aren't normally counted in GDP, like the flood damage a coastal wetland prevents. The $33 trillion mark and other figures like it vary widely while provoking much controversy...and are increasingly taken by world political and business leaders as self-evident, touted as the next big thing in conservation.

$125 trillion is a best guesstimate. It's a follow-up to Costanza's landmark 1997 paper in which he and colleagues suggested the number might be more like $33 trillion. At the time, other researchers had reviewed existing valuation studies, finding that overall an acre of wetlands might be valued anywhere between six cents and over $22,000! Other commentators noted that looking at just one particular ecological function (say, flood prevention), the values researchers came up with could differ by two orders of magnitude from site to site. For many critics, these numbers imply the reduction of nature to something to be bought and sold, which is particularly problematic if they're going to fluctuate so wildly. For others, no matter the range of values, they just aren't helpful - they're all a "serious underestimate of infinity" because we simply can't do without many of things nature does for us, like provide breathable air. Still, for a growing number of conservationists and decision-makers, putting some number - often a dollar value - on ecosystems is exactly what's needed to save it, to show policy makers and businesses the economic importance of nature, in hopes of preventing its destruction and encouraging its conservation.

So where do these numbers come from?

It's appealing to write-off statements like, "the value of an acre of wetland is six cents," as simply the work of ivory tower intellectuals busily justifying their own existence. After all, the scholars who published the most recent study are all affiliated with an academic institution. It's also easy to get the sense that these numbers come from no place in particular. That's the feeling you get reading histories of the ecosystem service concept (see here and here). These papers do important work revealing that the valuation of nature just didn't come along in 1997 with Costanza et al.'s first estimate of the value of the world's ecosystems. But beyond having a history, behind Costanza et al.'s new number and the “modelling sausage” that spit it out is a body of literature, a set of theories, and communities of scholars called environmental and ecological economics. And this community and its history is grounded in place. Valuing nature didn't just appear from out of nowhere. Environmental, and its younger, upstart cousin, ecological, economics and the basis for valuing nature come out of a long-standing engagement with wetlands, especially coastal marshes, and particularly as they faced development pressure, often from the oil/gas industry. When ecologist Eugene Odum and economist Len Shabman sparred in the 1970s over how exactly conceptually and empirically to get at nature's value, their material was Gulf Coast marshes. Today, in a post-Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy world, when we hear prominent arguments for restoring or conserving ecosystem services because of their value, it's coastal places like Mobile Bay, AL that are paraded out as examples of where coastal restoration "show strong returns on dollars invested." It's the US Gulf Coast that has defined nature's valuation as we know it today - its methodology and policy advocacy - and will continue to shape it in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The Gulf Coast oil and gas industry's payments to oystermen for access to lay pipelines across harvesting grounds mark economists', conservationists', and others' earliest struggles with valuing nature's goods and services beyond the confines of established markets. The Gulf's hydrocarbon industry grew significantly following World War II in order to meet growing demand from suburban consumers, as Jason Theriot details in his great new book about the twin histories of the industry and wetland loss and protection in the Gulf. But, of course, companies like Tennessee Gas needed to get their products to market - mainly on the rapidly urbanizing east coast - from wells in the middle of Louisiana's marshes. To do so, they laid hundreds of miles of pipelines in canals carved through wetlands. These areas, however, were often the same spots where oystermen had traditionally harvested. At the time, in the 1950s, the ecological consequences of the kinds of hydrological disruptions caused by canals were already to some extent understood by fishermen and scientists alike: the catch would likely be diminished from any nearby canals. In part because many working in the hydrocarbon industry were local oyster experts themselves and in part because of the influence the fisheries community had historically exerted on state regulators, oil and gas companies went out of their way to provide compensation for direct damages from pipelines. What the industry paid was simply what the expected catch would have fetched on the open market. In paying oystermen for losses to their harvest, oil and gas companies were acknowledging:the broader effects of their activities, but still had some market signal to guide them; they were not trying to compensate for things without market prices like water quality that environmental economics pioneers like Dales were first proposing at the time. The industry's payments were ad hoc and not meant to be a systematic assessment of all of the what we would now call ecosystem services a wetland provided. Still, conservationists seemed to be at least considering for the first time about what values the market wouldn't capture. For instance, the chief of the Oyster Division of Louisiana's Wildlife and Fisheries Commission was particularly concerned that compensation would not account for long-term, large-scale effects:

“we feel that the long range effects resulting in permanent ecological changes are by far the most serious and the most difficult to assess damages for. Direct effects are largely a matter of obtaining ROW [right of way] and making adjustments for damages at the time of construction. The area involved is comparatively small and involves only the path of the canal and the immediate vicinity on each side. Ecological and hydrographic changes may be permanent and may affect extensive areas ten miles or more on either side of the canal.” (58)

Into the 60s and 70s, conservationists at Louisiana's state environmental agencies and at Louisiana State University (LSU) continued calling for a more formal recognition of the importance of wetlands, as part of a growing movement nationwide to daylight corporate and government decision-making that had impacts on the environment. As the story goes, in1969, the massive oil spill offshore of Santa Barbara, CA inspired Congress to pass the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which required all federal agencies to undertake a formal review of the costs and benefits of any action with a major effect on the environment. NEPA, however, did not require agencies to monetize these costs and benefits in order to evaluate projects. Ultimately, with executive orders from Reagan and successive administrations requiring more cost benefit analysis (CBA), monetization became the default. Already by the 70s, the Army Corps of Engineers had been conducting CBAs of its projects. As Tennessee Gas looked to the dock price of oysters to account for some of the broader effects of its pipeline canals, the corps might determine whether or not to build a dam based on the cost to fisheries weighed against the benefits, measurable in dollar terms, arising from new recreation opportunities.

CBAs accounted for only so much of what conservationists thought was important about coastal habitats. ← This if anything is the constant refrain throughout the history of nature's valuation, from both advocates and critics: what are we counting? CBA might assess how a levee project would cost in damages made to fisheries, but at the time there were few techniques for accounting for the loss of storm surge protection that came from impounding wetlands. Easily the landmark piece decrying the limits of CBA was James Gosselink, Eugene Odum, and R.M. Pope's 1974 paper, “The Value of the Tidal Marsh”. It was a short white paper written for the LSU Center for Wetland Resources, but nonetheless recieved remarkable national attention from wetland conservationists as they made their case in the 70s for increasing resource protection. Gosselink et al.'s aims were to counterbalance development pressure on coastal ecosystems by expanding what ought to be counted as monetary cost from development. For instance, they valued the waste assimilation capacity of wetlands by looking at what it might cost regions to fully treat their sewage if all wetlands imply vanished and were replaced with wastewater plants. This “replacement cost” was not a market price, but was an existing signal (and it's measures like these that led to some of the most famous examples of institutional payments for ecosystem services, namely New York City's payment to farmers in the city's watershed to conserve natural habitat, which has reduced the region's water treatment costs.) The group, in the end, described wetland value in terms of $/acre/yr, but how they got their was through the concept of "emergy.” Emergy is a neologism for the amount of solar energy embodied in an ecological good or service. This could be converted into monetary terms by comparing the caloric requirements for service production in a wetland to the price to burn calories in things like oil that do have a market price. It may sound a little convoluted today, but the idea still has some traction. What's important about the emergy argument is that it proposes that nature's value is intrinsic; value arises from ecological transfrormations of energy, rather than supply and demand. Not surprisingly, this upset many economists, some of whom thought the idea went against some of the fundamental tenets of their discipline, in which value is fundamentally relative, dependent on the vagaries of supply and demand, and ultimately, how much rational subjects desired certain things. This is precisely what Gosselink et al. were skeptical of: if we believe neoclassical economics, nature has no value because it has no market price. But of course nature has value and so it must reside somewhere in nature. As one research team later put it, “The point that must be stressed is that the economic value of ecosystems is connected to their physical, chemical, and biological role in the overall

system, whether the public fully recognizes that role or not.” (emphasis in original) Politically, this perspective translated into an argument to not leave wetland protection to the whims of the market, but for better government planning. That would be something at least Gosselink would be more involved with in the next decade, contributing to the consolidation of Louisiana's modern oil/wetland regulatory regime while leading environmental reviews of projects like the massive Louisiana Offshore Oil Port.

One student of Howard Odum – Eugene's brother and collaborator - was none other than Bob Costanza, lead author of the 2014 paper valuing the world's ecosystem services at $33 trillion. After graduating from the University of Florida in the late 70s, he got a job at LSU. As he recalls it, he was in part drawn there by the presence of Herman Daly, whose work was moving in similar directions and had been an inspiration, and who happened to show up at his job talk. LSU at the time would have been a hub of activity focused on valuing nature, through coastal marshes, with Gosselink, Costanza, and Daly all pioneering in their own way and Eugene Turner, another freshly-minted student of Odum, making headway on understanding the ecological effects of oil and gas canals on the coast. Throughout the 80s (and to some extent into today) Costanza would publish on the ecological and economic facets of Louisianan and Gulf wetlands. In one paper in particular, 1989's “Valuation and Management of Wetland Ecosystems,” he and his co-authors produced another estimate of Louisiana's wetlands, a follow-up to Gosselink et al. Like Gosselink et al., Costanza, Maxwell, and Farber conducted an emergy analysis. But they also did something different: besides counting calories or looking at the market rate of fish raised by coastal estuaries, they actually hit the pavement (a boat ramp parking lot, actually) and asked people what wetlands were worth to them. The technique is known as contingent valuation. What they were after was people's "revealed" preferences - the amount each person spent on gas to get themselves to a wetland to fish could be considered part of its value, as a provider of a recreational service. The researchers were also interested in "stated" preferences - what people say they would pay to protect a wetland. If you're thinking that preferences sounds a lot more in line with the neoclassical economics approach than with the emergy perspective, you'd be right. We might read Costanza et al.'s paper as a sort of continental divide in the valuation of nature: the first half an emergy analysis focused on elucidating the inherent values of nature, a perspective that was prominent up until that point, the second half all about new techniques to get after how much society desires wetlands in practice, regardless of what nature has to say about it, new and exciting methodolgies that were about to get their trial by fire (see below). And this sort of split reflects where Costanza et al. end up in the paper when it comes to policy recommendations: they suggest that oil and gas companies provide bonds to cover the mitigation of their impacts. The amount of the bond would be based on the predicted extent and nature of the impacts, and depending on the final ecological outcome, the company would get more or less of its bond back. The researchers' argument here was not for better planning to restrict where the oil and gas industry could work, but to modify the industry's accounting practices, something that is all the rage now, with TEEB and TNC working hard at incorporating green accounting in business.

Here's the thing about contingent valuation: it doesn't work. Economists often expect people to behave rationally, but asking people how much they would pay to protect pelicans has presented economists with a number of persistently thorny issues. For instance, when researchers ask people how much they would pay to protect a nearby natural area from a hypothetical development scenario, people regularly act strategically and give “protest” answers. They'll say $0, insinuating that the park is priceless, or offer some absurdly high price, all in the belief that there may be an actual development project in the works and that their answers may stop it. It also turns out that people don't value twice as much wetland at twice the price. It was another “largest to date” oil spill – the Exxon Valdez tanker leak in 1989 - that brought to a head many of the methodological concerns surrounding the use of contingent valuation (in theory and applied to real cases). Economists and regulators alike asked themselves, how do we figure out how much damage the tanker spill has caused to wildlife? What about the value someone in Iowa places on the mere existence of some species in Alaska? NOAA, in charge of the clean-up, commissioned a study led by some of the top minds not just in environmental economnics but economics writ large - Nobel Prize winners like Kenneth Arrow - to see if contingent valuation was a proper method to use. They found that it was, and the courts have affirmed NOAA's prerogative to use it. But rarely it has.

Instead, NOAA has tended to employ good ole replacement cost. If it costs $100 million to buy all the construction equipment, fill, and plants to replace a wetland degraded by a Chevron oil spill, then Chevron must pay that amount. Like contingent valuation, the problem with replacement cost, as practiced in NRDA compensation, is that it doesn't work. The cost of replacing ecological structure doesn't necessarily equal the cost of lost ecological functions. It's one thing to put the right kinds and quantity of plants back in; it's another to make sure that the ecosystem is providing the same kind of flood mitigation service, for instance.

Doubts about the object and goal of compensation are precisely what are haunting economists yet again following the lastest “largest oil spill to date,” the Deepwater Horizon spill. It inspired a revisiting of the contingent valuation question with some authors revising their position from 20 years ago post-Exxon Valdez. Diamond, for instance, is now even more critical of contingent valuation and more skeptical that it could ever be of much use. Some number is not better than no number. Meanwhile, the spill has become a poster child for ecosystem service valuation advocates. In the monumental TEEB synthesis report, the section on “Applying the Approach” begins with the lamentation that if only the value of wetland services had been properly accounted for in business practice, BP would have never let the spill happen.

What is clear from the Deepwater Horizon fallout is that beyond whatever BP ends up having to pay to compensate for affected wetlands, they're going to have to pay separate fines into another fund to be used for large-scale restoration of the coast, beyond specific places the spill reached. This is a (bitter) windfall for conservationists; as one put it -"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity" to do something about Louisiana's land loss problem. BP money, at least in Louisiana, will be funneled into the Master Plan the state's CPRA has developed. The Master Plan lays out restoration principles and priorities (e.g. let nature do the work - harness the Mississippi River to deliver sediments to open water to build new land) and describes a suite of sites selected for restoration. These sites were selected based on their cost effectiveness, which in part has been a question of how many ecosystem services restoration will bring - how much flood prevention or how many alligators, for instance. The question here has is not so much the cash value of these services; the authors of the Plan explicitly note: "We didn't have the time this time around to look at that." As the head of the CPRA noted, however, this kind of analysis is in the works for the next version of the Master Plan, coming in 2017. At the heart of the matter is the development and deployment of economic valuation techniques for evaluating public spending. Economists are hard at work determining what kinds of restoration are most worthwhile: how many acres will $X in sediment diversions bring in over time compared to other methods of marsh creation? So far, acreage - a fairly straightforward metric - has been the target, which makes sense giving land loss is measured in acres, but expect to see ecosystem services migrate into the accounting. The goal in valuing the land building and protecting services provided by coastal wetlands is to spend public money wisely in an era of austerity. These metrics allow decision-makers to evaluate tradeoffs. Already in the master plan, the increase in certain ecosystem services like carbon sequestration were argued to outweigh and justify the decrease in other services, like shrimp habitat. Again, these were not yet $ valued. This time around, it certainly won't be emergy used to derive the value of these public goods. Instead, what we are seeing hints at is a move toward marketizing services. Instead of developing $ metrics to inform planning or to build new public institutions (via bonding a la Costanza), some important Louisiana decision-makers are turning to potential carbon and nutrient markets to help value (and pay for) wetland benefits. There's no need to do contingent valuation of a wetland function like carbon sequestration that is traded in California's cap and trade market at $10 a ton - that's the value right there.

Where does nature's value come from? In no small part, from those working to understand and protect Gulf Coast marshes. The practice of assigning the environment a dollar value continues to evolve and does so as practitioners – regulators, economists, scientists - engage with these ecosystems, providing certain opportunities and obstacles. Indeed, an ongoing question within the field is the role of environmental science and the extent to which ecologists can provide the kind of information about nature economists want and need to do valuation. The complexity of ecological functions - their nonlinearity, dynamsism, etc. - has long been acknowledged as a stumbling block, from Westman's prescient 1977 Science article to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment to even the most ostensibly gung ho supporters of valuation, TEEB. These difficulties do not mean that the champions of the valuation of nature feel defeated. Just consider how Costanza felt in 1997, "….although ecosystem valuation is certainly difficult and fraught with uncertainties, one choice we do not have is whether or not to do it". Besides environmental economics' struggle with its existential dependence on externally produced knowledge, its practitioners struggle with understanding their own conditions for knowing nature's value. There's still much question about whether contingent valuation will work. We've seen a few here: people don't always act rationally, and they also reject the survey techniques researchers employ to come up with their numbers. This is setting aside what is perhaps the trickiest question, that of benefits transfer, or the practice of taking the monetary values for ecosystems in one part of the world and using them in a different part of the world. After all, as one scholar put it, "An acre of coastal salt marsh seaward of New Orleans is many times more valuable …than an acre of abandoned farm pasture in Nebraska” and it's being able to say how much more valuable and how locally specific to get that troubles many researchers. Finally, what kind of policy angle environmental economists ought to take is still open to debate (the riff between so-called environmental and ecological economists itself is a part of that). Is nature open for business and up for sale? Or is the goal simply better planning and perhaps $ numbers aren't needed? You can expect those questions to be asked if not resolved in any good paper today. Yet, as one group of historians of the ecosystem services paradigm notes, these uncertainties are not the growing pains we might expect from an emerging research perspective. As is clear when we look at the history of coastal marsh protection in the Gulf Coast, nature's valuers have had at least 40 years experience to figure things out. Instead, what lingering questions and simmering debates reflect are genuine obstacles to a rightly controversial practice.

In attempting to answer these questions and close these debates, how economists, regulators, and scientists go about valuing nature will evolve. This of course is happening globally. One only has to follow the Natural Capital Project around the world, from Colombia to British Colombia, to get a sense of the importance of these places to how the vision of nature as capital is being articulated and materialized. But Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast will undoubetedly continue to be a sort of lab for experimenting on the policy, science, and economics behind the valuation of nature - the place where many of the important conversations ongoing about the future of conservation in the face of climate change are worked out. As a senior adviser to America's Wetland Foundation recently put it, “We can test it better than anyone.”

Much ado about the causes of wetland loss in Louisiana

You might remember that last summer, the levee board responsible for protecting much of metro New Orleans filed a landmark lawsuit against some 90 oil and gas companies. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Production Authority - East (SLFPAE), formed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, claimed that the canals these companies carved across coastal wetlands to set up drilling operations were significant drivers of wetland loss in the area historically, losses which could have mitigated storm surges. Pointing to industry, government, and academic reports alike they claim that the companies have not fulfilled their responsibility to fill in the canals and restore exploration and drilling sites. 

Wednesday, in a must-view PowerPoint presentation to the state's Coastal Planning and Restoration Authority (CPRA), SLFPAE made a pretty compelling defense of their case. What they did was zoom in on one particular case - the Delacroix area in St. Bernard parish - where canals have led to saltwater intrusion, erosion, and ultimately the conversion of marsh and swamp land into open water. I've gathered the slide by slide time series they presented into a handy GIF to illustrate their argument:

Wetland loss between 1956 and 2008 in the Delacroix, LA area. Canals that were dredged in order to move oil equipment are drawn in red arrows. Source: SLFPAE presentation.

You can see the same result when we focus in on just the past fifteen years With Google Earth imagery, I created another GIF that spans every other year or so from 1998 to the present.

Wetland loss between 1998 and the present in Delacroix. Source: Google Earth.

CPRA's chairman, Garrett Graves, however, is not so convinced by SLFPAE's argument. He thinks that going after the hydrocarbon industry is misguided. Instead, CPRA intends to sue the Army Corps of Engineers to get that agency to own up to the role that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) shipping channel played in altering hydrological regimes in the wetland complex east of New Orleans and in shuttling Katrina's storm surge straight into the city. The meeting yesterday was just the most recent and most visible skirmish in a war of words between CPRA and SLFPAE over whether the SLFPAE lawsuit is legitimate and whether CPRA's approach would be more effective.

At first glance, it seems like SLFPAE and CPRA's disagreement is mainly over what they see as the causes of wetland loss in the area. SLFPAE points at oil/gas companies and their extensive network of canals; CPRA the corps and MRGO. But this is not just a debate about who's to blame. As SLFPAE's lawyers pointed out in their presentation, Graves himself has repeatedly acknowledged the part played by the hydrocarbon industry's canals. Everyone agrees, to a significant extent, that the problem has multiple drivers, whether they're as prominent as MRGO or as ubiquitous as oil/gas canals. The two institutions primarily disagree about what's the most politically and economically beneficial line of attack to solve the problem. SLFPAE says getting oil money can more than pay the bills on the state's ambitious $50 billion dollar master plan for coastal restoration; Graves seems to think that would result in less money going to communities for restoration. Obviously, the choice of who to blame has meaningful consequences for what gets fixed, but it'd be a mistake to think that one side doesn't get the ecological reasoning of the other.

Speaking of who to blame, take another look at the second GIF. If you didn't already notice it, much of the conversion of the Delacroix wetlands into open water happens between 2004 and 2005 (the pic that year was taken in October). Of course, as the first GIF demonstarted, wetlands loss had been occurring there for decades by then. But Katrina appears to have been the coup de grace. Research has shown how hurricanes and other weather events lead to wetland loss: the wetlands in Louisiana east of the Mississippi River lost up to 25% of their land area after Katrina. The presence of canals undoubtedly exacerbated Katrina's effect here, but the storm itself nevertheless has had a singular and lasting effect on the landscape. 

The easy thing to do is wonder whether all the money the state plans to spend to rebuild barrier islands and wetlands will just be washed away by the very storms they are meant to mitigate. The tougher and more important question to ask is whether decision-makers and conservationists realize this and are prepared to engage in a continual investment to redesign a landscape shaped by climate change.

A look at RESTORE Act implementation

What would you do if you had about a billion dollars for ecological restoration?

That's exactly what the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council (or, Council) is trying to figure out. That's no easy task given that the Council is a powerhouse, high-level government entity composed of the five Gulf Coast governors and six executive branch Cabinet members (think secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, EPA administrator, etc.)The Council came into being when President Obama signed the RESTORE Act last year. That Act put 80% of the Clean Water Act fines BP and Transocean are going to pay for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the hands of the Council. It's the largest pot of money for restoration in the US ever.

Question is, how do you even go about spending that much money in a time when any sort of surplus in government hands seems like the work of a divine hand, and so usually gets cannibalized in the ritual sacrifices that follow? [Update: the sequester is already taking a 5% toll on RESTORE Act funds] Well, this Council has a comprehensive plan. More accurately, as of late last week the Council has put out their initial comprehensive plan that describes the principles for how it will distribute money to various Gulf Coast restoration projects and programs. I had the chance to read it; here are my initial reactions:

1. "The decisions made pursuant to the Plan will be based on the best available science, and this Plan will evolve over time to incorporate new science, information, and changing conditions. The Council will coordinate with the scientific community to improve decision-making." (5)It's a living, breathing document. It's meant to change over time, as funding levels and priorities change, but also with new science. Whether scientists can tell them what they want or need to hear, is of course another question.

2. No one actually knows how much money there is, since so much of it is tied to pending litigation. The number could go up past 10 billion when BP pays up.

3. The plan doesn't actually spell out how the Council will fund anything, nor what it would most like to fund. A funding strategy and priorities list come later.

4. "Storm risk, land loss, depletion of natural resources, compromised water quality and quantity, and sea-level rise are imperiling coastal communities’ natural defenses and ability to respond to natural and man-made disruptions." (4) It's clear that the Council sees ecosystem health as fundamental to community health, though no necessarily vice versa, and that this means a weaker ability to adapt to future climate and other disasters.

5. Scientists do seem to have gotten across the point that restoring species alone, on postage-stamp size sites is not the best approach to restoration. "The Council recognizes that upland, estuarine, and marine habitats are intrinsically connected, and will promote ecosystem-based and landscape-scale restoration without regard to geographic location within the Gulf Coast region." The planners apparently see themselves as immune to geographic bias and politics, and there's some good landscape ecology here.

6. It only comes up once, but it's unclear what the role of the private sector is here. However, much ado is made about coordinating with other efforts, in general: "The Council will encourage partnerships and welcome additional public and private financial and technical support to maximize outcomes and impacts. Such partnerships will add value through integration of public and private sector skills, knowledge, and expertise" (7) There are a growing number of voluntary restoration projects in the works, not to mention talk of linking up with California's cap and trade scheme for wetland blue carbon credits, and how to coordinate these market sector activities with a federal plan will be worth watching.

7. You don't spend a billion dollars and not have anything to show for it. "The Council recognizes the importance of measuring outcomes and impacts in order to achieve tangible results and ensure that funds are invested in a meaningful way." (7) There's an opening here for ecosystem services accounting, but we'll have to wait and see.

8. The money quote from the whole thing is the Council's definition of ecosystem restoration. That's kinda what they're about anyway:

"All activities, projects, methods, and procedures appropriate to enhance the health and resilience of the Gulf Coast ecosystem, as measured in terms of the physical, biological, or chemical properties of the ecosystem, or the services it provides, and to strengthen its ability to support the diverse economies, communities, and cultures of the region. It includes activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability. It also includes protecting and conserving ecosystems so they can continue to reduce impacts from tropical storms and other disasters, support robust economies, and assist in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change (per Executive Order 13554)."

There's a lot going on here! What is restoration? Well, it's not just bulldozers and backhoes, it's methods and procedures. In other words, it's science and technical expertise just as much as it is new wetlands. Watch for this to become controversial, with conservationists claiming that not enough money is being spent on the ground in actual projects. What's the goal? Health, resilience, and mitigation of climate impacts. It's not clear to me that there isn't potentially a huge tradeoff between the ecosystem health and ability to mitigate climate impacts, but we'll see. How do you get there? You initiate or accelerate recover, or you protect and conserve. And finally, how do you measure it all? Straight out of the CWA, it's physical, biological, or chemical properties. Or, ecosystem services.

9. The last point is, again, the Council won't be just drawing on existing marine and wetland science, and they won't just be incorporating the best available science as it hits the presses, they're producing it. The sense is that there's a lot yet to figure out yet in the planning, technical assistance, and implementation phases of restoration, and that the Council is more than ready to dish out money to "evaluation and establishment of monitoring requirements and methods to report outcomes and impacts; and measurement, evaluation, and reporting of outcomes and impacts of restoration activities." (15) The question will be, what kind of science is the Council interested in funding?

Forever forever? What the heck does permanent mitigation mean?

In a recent op-ed for USA Today, mitigation banker Wayne Walker argues for establishing prairie chicken conservation banks, as a way to prevent the looming "train wreck" between environmentalist and oil/gas industry interests. It's a well-written piece that tries to spell out in basic terms, what mitigation is all about (EcosystemMarketplace renamed it, "How to explain mitigation to your grandmother"). Sometimes, though, it's deceptively simple. A big part of Walker's case is that offsets, like diamonds, are forever. He points to wetland and stream mitigation: "The logic of permanent easements is straightforward: Draining a wetland to build something is permanent -- not temporary -- and therefore the mitigation should also be permanent. The same principle holds true for the chicken. Impacts to it and its habitat are both permanent – the offset should be as well." Problem is, there's a clear difference between a permanent easement and a permanent offset, a difference Walker doesn't sort out. An easement is no guarantee of ecological function. Sure, the Corps will require an easement, but are they going to come back to the site in 50 years and check in to see what's up? To assess whether the wetland, stream, or prairie habitat is in a condition or performs such that it will account for the original impact the site offset? Maybe, but even if the Corps/USFWS did come around, would they require the bank to do anything about it? Should we even care? If the wetlands your local Wal-Mart paved over today are going to dry up or sink into the sea anyway in the next 20 years because of climate change, does it matter that the compensatory mitigation site Wal-Mart buys credits from function in the same way the wetlands currently do? I've walked through similar issues here and here. If, as Walker notes, the goal for all sides is "certainty," these are key questions if mitigation banking is to gain a sense of (ecological) legitimacy in an era of rapidly changing climates.

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.

Chicago River restoration, Chicago River gentrification?

Let's continue with our focus on species. The past couple of weeks I've talked about various mechanisms for conserving endangered species habitat - mitigation banking and The Conservation Registry. But habitat restoration work is often just as much about dealing with invasive species as it is with fostering natives. So what about the invasives?

The Chicago River certainly presents an interesting case of invasive species politics - it's the last "line in the sand - wait, water - the US government has set for the threatening, but by no means threatened, Asian carp. But what's fascinating about the case is that invasives like the carp play only one part in a whole drama over the river's restoration. A recent discussion on Windy City station WBEZ lays out the million $ question - will people ever swim and fish in the Chicago? The program's definitely worth a listen (thanks to Jessa Loomis for passing along the link!)

The most striking feature about the Chicago, I learned from listening, is that it now flows in the opposite direction of its pre-settlement course. That is, now it flows from Lake Michigan to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC), into the Des Plaines, and eventually the Mississippi. That's how the carp got into the system and how they are now threatening the Lake's fishery. Then there's the question of how much of a river the river really ought to be. Huh? My understanding is that the whole Chicago area used to be one big wetland that the river just kind of mozied its way through in the best (wettest) of years. (I think it's Bill Cronon's Nature's Metropolis that has a bit of interesting background on this aspect of Chicago's environmental history).

Participants on the WBEZ program did not, of course, suggest turning Chicago back into a wetland, and instead focused on a number of things wrong with and promising for the river. To start, the "Sanitary" in CSSC is one fat euphemism for the city's use of the river to send all of its crap downstream instead of into the lake. The biggest problem here is with the city's combined sewer system. You can think of a combined sewer system as, like the internet, a series of tubes and these tubes take in both all the sewage and surface runoff. When it rains enough, Chi-town can't sanitize all the inflow and some is dumped straight into the river. In Chicago - it being a decent-sized urban area with your standard set of impervious surfaces - you get a lot more runoff from heavy rains than you would from, say, a prairie (thinking here, too, about climate change exacerbating extreme weather events...) Apparently water quality standards are now in place for the river, by which I think the WBEZ program host means to say that under section 303 of the Clean Water Act, (IL?) EPA has finally gotten around to designating the river as potentially swimmable and fishable and will require polluters like the City of Chicago to help make it that way. Still, as anyone familiar with the enforcement of any environment regulation might be able to guess, whether - and how - these standards can be acted upon successfully is another matter. Even the show's title sounds skeptical - will people ever actually recreate on the river (even with these new standards)?

Then there's the issue of reversing the flow - err..."re-reversing" the flow. I'm not sure about the ecology of flow reversal. Reversal would stop shipping Chicago's shit down to the Gulf of Mexico, and potentially cut off the carp, but it might not serve the lake well. At any rate, there's probably some huge political barriers to flow reversal. The WBEZ radio host played a clip of  IL Senator Dick Durbin naming the political problem as the Army Corps of Engineers - it would take them too long and too much money to permit flow reversal and to actually get around to doing it.

Less ambitious restoration efforts are focusing on river recreation and neighborhood development along the river. One of the radio guests was a professor who taught a design class at Harvard where students came up with various plans for the river. On the river system side, students found that there's potential to re-meander the river a bit and add in some wetlands as part of new parklands. Maybe, eventually, people could even fish away the Asian carp from some of these parks. Then there's a whole bunch of abandoned warehouses and factories along the river that might make for new housing that could be tied into riverwalks and bike paths and the like.

But here's what I'm bringing it all back to: All of the physical design stuff sounds good - disinfecting discharge, re-reversing flow, and freeing up the river channel - but who does the "social restoration" of the river - the parks, the bike paths, and the boat houses - really benefit? The answer to this kind of big question is always case or place specific, as geographers know. It's too soon to tell for Chicago. One of the program participants named developments on the river - like the kinda new, recently expanded Ping Tom Park - as a sort of "river gentrification". That's an interesting notion - the idea that, as with neighborhood gentrification, new development might come at the expense of established residents and uses and primarily to the benefit of new ones. But it's not something the program guests dug into all. It's these kind of "fuzzy" questions that are worth asking right now.

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Next week: I'll probably try to figure out what the recent international Rio+20 conference on sustainable development will mean for ecosystem service politics in the US. Epic fail? Big win for green accounting? Stay tuned...

User-generated natures? The Conservation Registry

Let's continue with the story of the rare red-bearded Jackson County song lark (an endangered bird I made up; see the last post.). As a landowner, USFWS has let you bank mitigation credits for having restored some of the bird's habitat. At first, you're of course happy with your work - you've helped save the endangered species! After a few months, though, you get to thinking, does it really matter? Isn't my farm and this habitat I've created just in a tumultuous sea of non-habitat for the bird? You slip into a deep depression...

Here comes the Conservation Registry to the rescue! On the Conservation Registry website, landowners, project managers, and agency staff can post and view details on all sorts of restoration projects. The idea is to help those concerned with the success of restoration work to understand the context of their work - does your song lark project link up with others in the landscape? Is it in a priority area?

As the website explains it, the Registry was started in 2008 and originally focused on the Pacific Northwest - Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. It seems that much of the early work and core partnerships grew out of Oregon specifically, i.e. Defenders of Wildlife, Institute for Natural Resources, TNC Oregon, and The Other Firm. Since 2008 the Registry has expanded nationwide and indeed, it now seems to be hosting a ton of projects. Open up the map and you'll see a huge orange blob spreading across the US (notably absent, though, in the SW). Zoom in and of course you see the orange blob disintegrate into individual markers and sometimes polygons. A very preliminary examination tells me that a lot of these are national crop conservation programs  - like the Wetland Reserve Program - that were probably plugged in from some big NRCS database. The WRP is important to have on there, but certainly it does not account for all the restoration work going on. The Registry has a lot of potential, but how to continue to get projects on the site is a big question.

Here's what I'm bringing it back to: what sort of nature are we making out there when we do restoration and conservation? I'd argue nature isn't just that new sine-wave stream, riparian planting, or protected prairie, but the portrayal of those projects online and in code. I don't want to be abstract about this; I think the digitality of restoration really really matters. The digital life of a given project allows it to be seen - by other landowners, by agencies, by potential credit purchasers - and seen in particular ways for various ends. A project's representation online - especially its geocoding onto a Google Map layer - allows it to be put in a landscape context for all these folks to see and ultimately to act upon - be it by, for example, choosing to add - or not - another riparian planting to the watershed or changing funding priorities.

The Conservation Registry targets not just big NRCS data but individual land managers, so the "we" in the question: what nature are we making? is important. What are the similarities and differences between your average joe tweeting about or in, say, Lexington, KY and an individual landowner uploading a Cane Run creek restoration report onto the Registry? A growing set of geographers, best represented by FloatingSheep.org, might have some answers: they're taking long-standing concerns about cultural landscapes and thinking about the representation of place on and the spatiality of Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr, etc. (aside: perhaps something like the wild Bluegrass floating sheep would have made for a more interesting ESA example above...) Personally, I'm wondering not just about these user-generated spaces/places but user-generated natures. As Monica Stephens from Floating Sheep asks: what happens when men contribute disproportionately to Open Street Map? (hint: the picture of the world you get includes more stripclubs than daycare centers), we might ask: who is contributing to the Conservation Registry? NRCS staff with their WRP data? Local watershed councils? What kind of restoration is visible?


What's clear so far from the Conservation Registry is that the space of nature matters. Conservationists need to able to see watersheds and habitat corridors/fragments. Ultimately the line of inquiry suggested here is to look into the work going into coding nature/space. Red-bearded song larks and floating sheep are at stake.