Can the notion of ‘public good’ apply to Freshwater Biodiversity?
Last week a group of Cambridge-based conservationists published a paper in Science titled “Biodiversity Conservation: Challenges Beyond 2010” This restated the arguments that (1) unless people recognise the link between their consumption choices and biodiversity loss, the diversity of life on Earth will continue to decline and (2) biodiversity needs to be viewed as a public good. The timing of the paper is designed to increase pressure for more assertive action on biodiversity at the COP10 of the CBD, which takes place in Nagoya (Japan) next month.
Dr Mike Rands, Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and lead author of the paper, said: “Despite increasing worldwide conservation efforts, biodiversity continues to decline. If we are to make any kind of impact, it is critical that we begin to view biodiversity as a global public good which provides such benefits as clean air and fresh water, and that this view is integrated not just into policies but also into society and individuals’ day-to-day decisions.”
Dr Rands continued: “The recognition of biodiversity as a public good is not a new concept, and in recent years economists have made substantial progress in developing valuation techniques that quantify the local and global benefits of biodiversity.”
Unfortunately the paper does not specify its concept of ‘public good’. Economics distinguishes between a good that is non-rivalries (i.e consumption by one actor does not reduce availability for another) and non-excludable (i.e. no one can effectively be excluded from using the good).
How does the concept of public good relate to freshwater biodiversity? Many freshwater bodies are effectively managed to exclude some from exploiting biodiversity (e.g. fish) but equally many lakes, ponds and rivers are open access and support biodiversity that is ‘consumed’ in a non-extractive manner. We would welcome your thoughts and comments on the notion of freshwater biodiversity as a ‘public good’.
As the main driver of biodiversity loss seems to be the corporate world, driven by consumer appetites, companies need the tools to account for biodiversity in their balance sheet and start regarding the biodiversity as a public good. The Natural Value Initiative (NVI) created and developed a toolkit for the financial community to use in understanding companies’ dependence and impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services. This is the first tool of its kind enabling a rigorous evaluation of performance on this issue and a step in the right direction of incorporating biodiversity concerns in the corporate world.
Learning from Sherman the Shark
Cartoonist Jim Toomey created the comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, a wry look at underwater life starring Sherman the talking shark. As he sketches some of his favorite sea creatures live onstage, Toomey shares his love of the ocean and the stories it can tell.
The video embedded here is from the TED website and can also be accessed from here.
The innovation of this video is the use of art, here cartoon characters, to help inform about and understand issues related to environmental change. Art and entertainment are often much underestimated tools for driving change in attitudes and behaviour.
A similar point was made at an event I attended this week-end with Angela Palmer, the artist behind the Ghost Forest.
But if we cry out for change when we see trees being cleared out, we hardly never see the damages done under the water surface of the oceans or rivers. How many people realise the heavy consequences of the BP oil spills a few months ago?
Toomey’s talk added a significant voice to aquatic biodiversity conservation and I really encourage anybody who has a bit of time to spare to check it out.
IUCN makes bold claim that heightened extinction risk of African freshwater biodiversity threatens livelihoods
Today IUCN launched the results of a 5-year project to apply Red List extinction risk categories to 5,167 species of African freshwater biodiversity. The results are worrying – 21% of freshwater species were classed as threatened with extinction. Interestingly the IUCN press release explicitly states that this trend puts “the livelihoods of millions of people at risk” citing as evidence estimates of 7.5 million people in Sub-Saharan African depending on inland fisheries and the case of overfishing a group of fish know as ‘chambo’ in Lake Malawi (link for full details). Whilst the tactic of aligning extinction risk with threats to livelihoods is clearly intended to gain policy attention in relation to water extraction, dams and invasive alien species, I wonder whether the claimed causal link is as solid or clear cut as suggested. For instance, to what extent are ‘replacement’ fisheries composed of ubiquitous species dependent on the biodiversity in the system, or put another way what happens to other fresh water biodiversity with human use value when native fish assemblies are eradicated and replaced with a few food fishes? In short, is there a scientific basis for using the outputs of a threshold-based categorisation scheme to predict that millions of people will lose a key source of income, food and materials? This is not intended to suggest that the IUCN are being alarmist, rather it is to prompt discussion on the evidence we have, or the future research we need, to test causal links between the maintenance of freshwater biodiversity and the maintenance of freshwater ecosystem services. With water development set to increase massively across Africa, with for example, a doubling of irrigated land area by 2025 there is clearly an urgent need to marshal evidence and arguments.
Paul Jepson
I recently attended a media strategy workshop on biodiversity organised by the Netzwerk-Forum Biodiversitätsforschung. This is a network that links biodiversity research with wider German society (http://www.biodiversity.de/). The aim of the workshop was to discuss with media experts (i.e. print, radio and TV journalists) how to increase public awareness of the global biodiversity crisis.
For me, a key insight from the workshop was that the term “biodiversity” (which in German sounds very stiff) is too technical to be recognized by the public and politicians. This prompted me to ask whether biodiversity is a poor term (though not from a scientific point-of-view) and is partly responsible for the public ignorance of the reality of biodiversity crisis? Do we need to coin a better term? It goes without saying that competition for media spaces gets stiffer every year. Maybe what we need are good stories, sharp titles (I always admire the short titles in the Economist), as well as hard data and facts. A statement such as “the decrease of biodiversity is higher in freshwaters than in marine and terrestrial ecosystems” appears too vague and outside the box of everyday life to be successfully communicated.
I am very curious to get your opinion on get your comment on this topic.
Best wishes,
Klement
Is protecting nature a key for world economic security?
The English newspaper the Guardian published an article that highlights the risk of economic collapse and loss of culture if Britain does not protect the natural world.
The secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, Dr Ahmed Djoghlaf said during an interview with the Guardian: “What we are seeing today is a total disaster. No country has met its targets to protect nature. We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. If current levels [of destruction] go on we will reach a tipping point very soon. The future of the planet now depends on governments taking action in the next few years.”
Dr. Djoghlaf warned Britain and other countries not to cut nature protection in the recession. In a reference to expected 40% cuts to Britain’s department of the environment spending, he said: “(…) you may well save a few pounds now but you will lose billions later. Biodiversity is your natural asset. The more you lose it, the more you lose your cultural assets too.”
On another hand, the idea that we have to protect biodiversity for economic reasons, such as highlighted here and in the TEEB report, is very dangerous. The term of “ecosystem services” was introduced to help emphasize importance on nature’s resources for conservation purposes. Now it has derived to the idea that one can now continue to consume, and buy nature to save the planet instead of focusing on encouraging less consumption and more environmentally-friendly behavior.
You can hear Dr. Djoghlaf’s interview and read the full article from the Guardian here.
The UK’s Guardian Newspaper has launched a campaign to compile a list of 100 tasks that governments could undertake to prove their commitment to halting biodiversity loss. It’s a nice idea – to provide a list of specifics so governments can’t hide behind generalities. The campaign will ask specific governments to sign up to specific projects. Given the importance of freshwater biodiversity it would be great to see 10 of the 100 tasks targeting freshwater systems – but what would they be? What would be realistic, feasible and meaningful for a government to do? Suggestions can be submitted (under a pseudonym if you prefer) on the Guardian Environment website. The closing date is the end of August.
Join the debate
Current levels of spending on biodiversity conservation fall far short of what’s needed. But if there was an extra $US 100 billion per year to spend on biodiversity conservation, what would be the most cost-effective way to use it?
World Conservation asked leading environmentalists to outline their priorities. Read what they said here.
Now you get the chance to have your say here. How would you spend $100 billion on nature conservation to best effect?
The face of today
(Source: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
Mohammed Nawaz hangs on a moving raft before being rescued by the Pakistani Army in Sukkur, Pakistan on the 10th of August 2010. Pakistan is suffering from the worst floods in eighty years. The floods have already killed 1,500 people and displaced millions.
Despite the recent floods, Pakistan once a water-surplus country is now a water deficit one. According to WWF Pakistan, the situation in Pakistan indicates that the country is approaching conditions of chronic water-stress, facing sever water-related issues, such as:
– devastating effects due to the variability in rainfall levels and drought on agriculture, rangelands, wetlands
– ecosystem degradation in the Indus Delta due to sea-water intrusion
– reduction in reservoir capacity due to sedimentation – Tarbela, Mangla and Chashma are expected to lose 25% of their storage capacity by 2010
– threat to the population of freshwater-dependent species due to shrinking rivers and poor water quality.
The concept of ecosystem services was intended to help conservationists show the benefits of ecosystems for human well-being, but services are not yet seen to truly address human needs with current approaches focusing mostly on financial gain. Promoting development strategies that integrate conservation and service protection is essential.
Gary W. Luck et al. in their letter “Protecting ecosystem services and biodiversity in the world’s watersheds”, describe how they developed the first prioritization scheme for protecting ecosystem services in the world’s watersheds and compared their results with global conservation schemes. They found that by explicitly incorporating human need into prioritization strategies, service-protection priorities were directly focused on the world’s poorest, most densely populated regions. Watersheds in Southeast Asia and East Africa were found to be the most crucial priorities for service protection and biodiversity conservation.
Emphasizing human need is a substantial improvement over the money-based ecosystem-service valuations that undervalue the requirements of the world’s poor. Such approaches offer great hope for reconciling conservation and human development goals.
The economic value of biodiversity is an increasing consideration for policy makers, and understanding the public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for biodiversity may reflect its social value. In a recent UK survey, 27 % of those questioned were willing to pay towards improved river biodiversity, via higher energy prices from the resulting drop in hydro-electricity power output. 43% were not willing to pay at all. Among those willing to pay, beliefs and motives should be distinguished and considered in management decisions, such as ethical and social norms.
These results are more detailed in the paper titled: ‘Bringing social values into the economic value of water biodiversity’ (Source: Spash, C.L., Urama, K., Burton, R. et al. (2009). Motives behind willingness to pay for improving biodiversity in a water ecosystem: Economics, ethics and social psychology. Ecological Economics. 68:955-964.).
A new paper titled: Evidence needed to manage freshwater ecosystems in a changing climate: Turning adaptation principles into practice was released in the Science of the total Environment last week (Science of the Total Environment, Volume 408, Issue 19, September 2010, Pages 4150-4164 .
The paper is the result of the collaboration between 20 researchers from 16 UK organisations. It examines the scientific basis for adaptively managing vulnerable habitats and species and asserts that adaptation planning is constrained by:
– uncertainty about evolving climatic and non-climatic pressures,
– difficulties in predicting species- and ecosystem-level responses to these forces, and
– the plasticity of management goals.
This implies that adaptation measures will have greatest acceptance when they deliver multiple benefits, including, but not limited to, the amelioration of climate impacts.
The paper also advocates for more multi-disciplinary field and model experimentation to test the cost-effectiveness and efficacy of adaptation measures applied at different scales. It highlights the need for a major collaborative programme to:
– examine natural adaptation to climatic variation in freshwater species;
– identify where existing environmental practice may be insufficient;
– review the fitness of monitoring networks to detect change;
– translate existing knowledge into guidance; and
– implement best practice within existing regulatory frameworks.
The paper quotes some selected European research programmes addressing aspects of climate change and freshwater ecosystem management. Despite BioFresh not yet being quoted in such papers, it is clear that the project outcomes will contribute to fill some of these gaps and particularly the one underlining the need to build data assets that water researchers and policy makers can rely on for decision-making.
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