InVEST: Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs

Government officials, conservation professionals, farmers, and other land owners make decisions about how to use their land all the time. Yet, never before have any of these groups had a systematic way to demonstrate the future costs and benefits of their decisions for people and the environment. In its most ground-breaking effort, the Natural Capital Project aims to meet this challenge with InVEST, a new tool that can model and map the delivery, distribution, and economic value of life-support systems (ecosystem services), well into the future. The tool will help users visualize the impacts of potential decisions, identifying tradeoffs and compatibilities between environmental, economic, and social benefits.

How it Works

We begin by collecting as much information as possible about a given landscape. How much of the land is currently devoted to crops and/or forests? What percent is privately owned or managed? What are the zoning laws? The next step is to sit down with decision-makers and outline the scenarios that stem from different possible changes in land-use (development, restoration, or new government policies) and the desired outcomes (poverty alleviation, clean drinking water, and/or carbon sequestration).

Each scenario is then fed into InVEST’s unique modular structure: each module represents a different life-support system that can be evaluated independently or selected modules can be bundled together according to the specific scenarios and priorities in each place. InVEST can model and map the consequences of decisions on life-support systems in both economic and biophysical terms.

The impacts of each scenario on life-support systems are illustrated with easily interpreted maps, tradeoff curves, and balance sheets. These will be most relevant and useful if they are based on the specific opportunities and constraints identified by decision-makers and stakeholders which are unique to each community.

Suppose a state government is considering whether to subsidize small-scale organic farming. Such a policy would most likely have two major impacts: the division of large farm fields into smaller parcels, and reduced amounts of chemicals being used in the area. This scenario would clearly affect the local production of life-support systems, some of which may be interconnected (for example, pollination and irrigation support agriculture; irrigation is linked to flood mitigation, while biodiversity improves native pollination). With InVEST, users can visualize the various impacts of the proposed subsidy in a spatially explicit way using a variety of biophysical and economic terms.

Or, consider a conservation organization that wants to determine which places are the most threatened and represent opportunities for high returns for biodiversity and human well-being. Using InVEST, organizations will be able to identify places where strategic investment, policy opportunities, and local community engagement can protect biodiversity and vital life-support systems like providing clean drinking water. Without considering these human well-being and poverty alleviation questions, biodiversity conservation efforts will continue to fight an uphill battle.

Keeping it Simple: A multi-tiered approach

In addition to allowing users to decide which life-support systems to model and map, InVEST offers a multi-tiered approach so that users can choose the complexity of the outputs based on their specific needs and the quality and quantity of input data. Our models provide the flexibility to model and map life-support systems for a broad range of spatial resolutions. We have already demonstrated the ability of InVEST at scales ranging from the Willamette Valley in Oregon to global analysis.

Users choose the scale and model tiers based on their desired outputs, from relative scores for basic biophysical terms (Tier 1) to in-depth, high-resolution biophysical and economic terms (Tier 2 or Tier 3).

• • Tier 1 is fundamentally simple, provides a relative sense of the level of services provided across the landscape and requires few input data.
  • To calculate economic values, Tier 2 is required. Tier 2 provides a level of certainty needed to model economic terms realistically, but it needs more input data.
  • Tier 3 is capable of including land cover and use dynamics, plant community succession, nutrient balances, and similar complex processes when the input data are available. Tier 3 usually includes existing models like the CENTURY model for carbon cycling or Ecosim for biodiversity modeling.

Flexible Outputs: Economic and biophysical terms

With InVEST, users can switch back and forth between economic and biophysical terms as they evaluate the costs and benefits of land-use or policy decisions. Water quality, for instance, can be readily understood by government regulators in biophysical terms, using Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) - established limits on contaminants or sediments used by U.S. government agencies. Alternatively, we can calculate the cost to the local community of water treatment in economic terms like dollars.