Media Coverage & Publicity
Articles
Confronting the biodiversity crisis
Nature Reports Climate Change, May 5, 2010 (DOI)
“Nine watersheds tumble into Cauca Valley, a region in the southwest of Colombia sandwiched between two of the Colombia Andean mountain chains. For centuries, its richness has attracted humans, who exploited the valley's resources first for agriculture and stockbreeding, and later for hydroelectric power generation. Today, sugar cane production dominates the valley's industry.
“'There are many stresses from water use. The sugar cane sector is thirsty, but the people who live there also need it for daily activities and for drinking water,' says Alejandro Calvache, a water fund specialist at The Nature Conservancy, based in Cartagena, Columbia. TNC, in collaboration with the sugar cane growers' association, the regional environmental authority and several grassroots organizations, is building a water fund that will oversee a massive program of reforestation, water protection, soil improvements, education and training. By investing in the region's ecosystem services, the project, which is called 'Agua Por La Vida y la Sostenibilidad' — meaning 'Water for Life and sustainability' — aims to lessen climate change impacts and threats to biodiversity.
“Water funds exist globally to conserve watersheds, but this is one of the first to include climate change modelling to help direct investments. The International Center for Tropical Agriculture, a research institute in Columbia, is modelling scenarios to determine the effects of climate change on local water resources. These scenarios are then fed into a computer-based decision-making tool called InVEST, which has been developed by the Natural Capital Project, a partnership between TNC, Stanford University and the World Wildlife Fund. InVEST identifies the areas where climate change is unlikely to threaten activities the water fund has been invested in — such as promoting the reforestation of a hillside or teaching eco-friendly cattle-ranching practices — and their returns. 'Traditionally, conservation has pulled on people's heart-strings,' says Heather Tallis, lead scientist at Natural Capital. 'We try to appeal to people's lifeblood, like drinking water.'”
Losing life’s variety: 2010 is the deadline set for reversing declines in biodiversity, but little has been accomplished
“Just documenting diversity doesn’t guarantee that a place becomes a park. Selecting good bits requires understanding how critters use space and weighing competing claims for it.
“One recent approach looks to double the punch of the case for setting aside land by identifying biodiverse places that also provide documented ecosystem services, says Taylor Ricketts, who heads the World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Science Program, based in Washington, D.C. Though the two don’t match tidily, Ricketts has found a few natural sweet spots important for their variety of living things and for such boons as storing abundant carbon or collecting water.
“The Natural Capital Project...is refining software to allow fine-scale analyses, and Tanzania, the state of Hawaii and others are already using the software.”
The Interconnected Biosphere: Science at the Ocean's Tipping Points
Remarks published in Oceanography 23: 2, June 2010 (Video)
“The challenge of determining, measuring, and communicating the values of ecosystem services is being addressed through efforts such as the Natural Capital Project...to develop tools for facilitating incorporation of natural capital (i.e., valuation of ecosystem services) into decision making. Their first tool, InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs), can model and map the delivery, distribution, and economic value of ecosystem services into the future. InVEST allows users to visualize the impacts of their potential decisions, which enables identification of tradeoffs among environmental, economic, and social benefits. This tool has already been applied successfully using stakeholder defined scenarios to predict changes in land use and associated tradeoffs in the Willamette Valley, Oregon (Nelson et al., 2009). Although InVEST was initially focused on terrestrial ecosystems, it is now being applied to coastal and marine ecosystems to provide maps and projections of ecosystem services under different management alternatives for issues, such as tradeoffs associated with large-scale implementation of desalination plants in California (Ruckelshaus and Guerry, 2009). Marine InVEST offers a promising new approach for incorporating scientific information about ecosystem services into decision making and resource management.”
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Video & Audio
What is nature worth?
Our World 2.0, UN University, January 18, 2010
Streaming Video: “We need a new business model. What we need to start doing is recognizing the value of many other types of benefits [from nature], like water purification, climate stabilization, and biodiversity.” Gretchen Daily, Director, Natural Capital Project.
Why Ecosystem Services Matter
60-Second Earth, Scientific American February 5, 2009
Podcast: “In this world, cost benefit analysis and dollars are how decisions get made…When nature and the benefits that nature are not converted to dollars then it can't be on the table for those discussions and, in a way, nature's not getting credit for what it's doing.” Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist, The Nature Conservancy.
Putting a Price on Nature
Podcast: “As the economy struggles, a lot of people are thinking about prices these days. That's the focus of a new project at Stanford University, too, but their aim is to put a value on something that's never had a price tag - nature (Reporter's Notes, Podcast Archive).” Rebecca Shaw, Heather Tallis, and Gretchen Daily.
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