This is a First: Wetland Mitigation Infographic

Folks over at MS USA have developed what appears to be the first and only infographic about wetland mitigation available on the internet. It provides a nice explanation and history of wetland mitigation banking. Enjoy!

Shut the Front Door. Richard Branson is Talking about Ecosystem Services.

See on Scoop.it – Nature + Economics

I am floored. My favorite mega-millionaire Richard Branson (is he Batman? you gotta wonder) just posted a piece on the WSJ’s LiveMint.com about how it’s important to pay attention to biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Let me boil down WHY he thinks it’s important:

– Consumer demand: “Consumers are becoming increasingly frustrated with corporations that are only out for themselves, rather than helping their communities and the planet. Our group and other companies are going to need to know the answers to such questions [about biodiversity and ecosystem services]”

– Community relations (eg, impacts of a company’s operations on ecosystem services/biodiversity upon which local communities rely upon/enjoy): “What impact will our new offices have on the surrounding ecosystem?”

– Company innovation (/employee retention): “Everyone was energized by this challenge of envisioning and creating a sustainable future… And as I was listening to the researchers and my team, I was reminded that learning is not just a luxury, but integral to the growth of our group and the health of our company.”

Here’s WHEN it’s important:

– Siting a new facility: “Where is the most suitable and sustainable location to position our new factory?”

Here’s HOW Virgin is considering biodiversity and ecosystem services:

–  Measuring impacts: “we are looking at ways to better account for the impacts our activities are having on the natural resources”

So cool to see a topic like this coming out of a CEOs mouth. My work here is done.

See on www.livemint.com

What’s the Added Value of an Ecosystem Services Approach for Business?

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in grey literature reports (eg, TEEB for Business), guidance (eg, Corporate Ecosystem Services Review) and tools (eg, InVEST) on integrating ecosystem services in the corporate world. Pretty much all of these sources talk about a business case for ecosystem services. Let’s say a company is convinced and tries to figure out what it means to integrate ecosystem services in their business. I think it gets tricky here because many companies are already undertaking corporate sustainability activities. Indeed, many of the actions held up as examples in TEEB, in the Corporate EcoForum’s “Valuing Natural Capital” commitments, and others could be put in the sustainability box. For example, commitments to tree-planting projects to offset a company’s impact on global climate regulation (an ecosystem service).

So what’s the difference between sustainability and ecosystem services? Look, there’s no guidance out there answering this question. I received some input from the Business & Ecosystem Services Professionals LinkedIn group that may help and I’ve got some ideas of my own, so I’m going to put out as a working hypothesis that the difference is thus:

1. A company has taken a holistic look at their impacts, dependencies and opportunities related to ecosystem services. This may be just a check-the-box process thing, but it indicates an intention to look at the big picture.
2. The action that a company is taking is somehow additional to what they’re already doing. I know a lot of companies are already thinking about their impacts on global climate change. So does that mean if they’re already buying carbon credits that they’re *check* done and done? Somehow that doesn’t seem right, even if it’s good work. In the above-mentioned LinkedIn discussion, Eric Landen noted “one of the key aspects of the ES approach is that it lets you examine tradeoffs and interconnections across multiple services, which doesn’t happen when you focus on one ES (such as water) to the exclusion of others.”
3. The company is somehow communicating their action on ecosystem services: in an annual report, in external voluntary reporting, in media communications… I know a lot of folks don’t like the term “ecosystem services” (see reports on messaging ecosystem services here and here), so it could be communicated in other ways.

I’m really interested in what other folks think about this. What do you think is the difference between regular corporate sustainability and corporate integration of ecosystem services? How can you tell/ what would be your indicator(s) that a corporation is taking action on ecosystem services?

OK, so now I’ll get to my original punchline: What’s the added value of an ecosystem services approach? That is to say: why would a company try to integrate ecosystem services instead of just doing their normal sustainability activities? I think the Dow/TNC partnership on ecosystem services just provided a good answer to this. In their recently released 2nd annual report on their collaborative, Dow/TNC report on their pilot project at their huge facility in Freeport, Texas along the Gulf Coast.

They determined priority ecosystem services for the facility (aka #1): impacts on air quality/opportunities for air quality mitigation, coastal hazard mitigation, and water supply. Then they did some specific studies looking basically at whether green infrastructure solutions would maintain or improve these ecosystem services, and whether it was more cost-effective than a grey infrastructure solution (a #2 activity). And here’s where I think they win on the value-added factor: they talk about the green infrastructure solution AND the additional ecosystem benefits that would occur (over and above the grey infrastructure solution). Maybe the green infrastructure solution didn’t slam-dunk win out in the cost-benefit analysis for all of the projects, but I think the additional ecosystem service benefits to the community are important. It’s fantastic that Dow/TNC have communicated these benefits in their annual report (a #3 activity). If they do end up implementing the green infrastructure projects, I wonder how they will communicate these benefits to the public? There aren’t a ton of examples of corporate communication of ecosystem services, but here are a few.

Please send your comments if you have other ideas on the value-add of an ecosystem services approach for a corporation.

Communicating Ecosystem Services Presentation

Last week, I assembled two sessions on communicating ecosystem services at the ACES 2012 conference. These sessions developed out of discussions on the topic on the soapbox of Ecosystem Commons earlier in the year. Here is my Prezi from the conference:

And here are my impressions of people’s challenges communicating ecosystem services:

1. It’s still a wild woolly world of jargon. Even for us insiders at the ACES conference, “ecosystem services” means different things to different people. I think we all get that the concept refers to the products and services that we get from Nature for free, but applying that concept to one’s work within a government agency, non-profit, or corporation is a big challenge.

2. We’re still working to make the case for incorporating ecosystem services into what we do. ACES attendees are still working to communicate the relevance of the concept of ecosystem services to agency leaders and corporate decision-makers. One big hurdle is leadership questioning how this is different than business as usual. Government agencies are already considering natural resources in their work. Businesses are already conducting Environmental Impact Assessments. They want to know succinctly, what’s the difference from what they already do (“what’s the delta?” I heard from one wonky friend of mine). And they don’t want consideration of ecosystem services to be just one more thing they have to do – one more report, one more analysis, etc.

3. Because people are working on problems #1 & #2 above, they don’t yet have simple communications challenges to address. I organized a working group session intended to let people work on their ecosystem services communications challenges and come out with a game plan. I envisioned that someone would come in and say “I need to convince the community about the value of watershed services” and then we’d get to work on a message to deliver to the audience, with help from my new buddy Brendan McLaughlin from Resources Media. Instead, what we heard from attendees were problems discussing ecosystem services within an agency due to a lack of common lingo. Or the challenge of communicating to different audiences at different levels of understanding of ecosystem services. Or how to develop an app for use in the developing world (ummm, I have no idea!).

So folks working in “ecosystem services” still have a lot to work on. Until we have everything figured out (…in 2030???), here are the basic messaging tips that our session highlighted in a nutshell:

Think about what you’d like to accomplish with your messaging, frame your message to your target audience &/or decision-makers, talk about common values, talk about the threats to those values, and then your solution to the challenge.

So easy, right? Good luck, folks!

Spinning Water Quality Trading: Pros and Cons

I recently came across two sources using language to spin water quality trading as a good thing, and as a real baddie. The Pros come from a Washington Post editorial spinning water quality trading as a means to improve water quality, and the Cons come from a Food & Water Watch press release with really loaded language painting water quality trading as the worst thing since mortgage-backed derivatives. Let the spinning begin!

Photo source: flickr sparktography

Pros (source: Washington Post editorial 9/30/2012):

Cost-efficiency: “The potential of a trading system to reduce pollution and save money is too great for state governments to ignore… A farmer who can cheaply cut his runoff beyond what regulators require could be awarded credits and sell those to a nearby water treatment plant that would have to install very expensive equipment to meet its required cuts in pollution. The farmer makes money, the plant saves money and the EPA’s pollution cap is met efficiently. A May study from the Chesapeake Bay Commission… estimated that such a program applied across the bay’s watershed could reduce cleanup costs by as much as 36 percent — if properly executed.”

Verification and monitoring: “One answer to the critics is that all the transactions that occur under the trading program are subject to EPA approval, and the agency can reject any that would unreasonably foul local waters. Another is that trading could save many tens of millions of dollars a year. If a slice of that goes to monitoring and verifying claimed reductions in pollution, the system would have more integrity, and everyone could still come out ahead.”

Cons (source: Food & Water Watch press release 10/3/2012):

It’s not authorized in the Clean Water Act: “This “pay-to-pollute” trading program represents a dramatic departure from the successful industrial pollution controls established by the Clean Water Act (CWA)… However, the trading provisions of this plan are not authorized under the CWA and likely means that the Bay will remain polluted for decades to come…”

Unmonitored/unverified: “The TMDL, as finalized, allows for unmonitored “nonpoint” sources of pollution, mainly agricultural operations, to claim unverified reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus discharges and sell these alleged reductions to “point” source industries like power plants and wastewater treatment plants.”

Anti-financial services industry sentiment: “Why would we put Wall Street, the same industry that brought us the financial crisis, in charge of protecting the Bay? ….It’s essentially an entitlement program for the financial services industry and polluters.” (-Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter) “We cannot rely on the worst polluters of the Bay and Wall Street traders to lead the efforts to revive this invaluable natural resource.” (-Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica) The Obama administration has been promoting water quality trading, which is favored by the financial services industry…”

IMHO this last point is an extreme hyperbole. The US financial services industry represents 15% of market capitalization of the S&P 500 or around $1.9 trillion annually. The tiny amount of water quality trading that might go on… even if it amounted to something in the ballpark of the annual sales of mitigation credits in the US… would amount to 0.10% of the financial services industry.

4 Wetland Mitigation Concepts Explained via Memes

The concept and practice of wetland mitigation banking is complicated to explain and understand. I thought I’d present key concepts using internet memes.

Concept 1: the Mitigation Hierarchy

The mitigation hierarchy is a concept used to explain how and when it’s acceptable to impact a natural resource and pay someone else to restore &/or protect it somewhere else. Here’s how it goes. A natural resource law prohibits impacts to wetlands/endangered species/biodiversity/native vegetation, but provides exceptions through a permitting process. To avoid the scenario where just about anyone can get a ‘license to trash’ the environment, so long as they write out a check or make it all better somewhere else, the permit process provides hurdles. One: you’ve got to show that you avoided impact to X natural resources. Two: you’ve got to show that you minimized impacts. Then and only then will the regulators consider letting you mitigate do compensatory mitigation* [note: they call it ‘offset’ outside the US].

*EPA’s official sequence is Avoid, Minimize, Compensate; with compensatory mitigation defined as “restoration, establishment, enhancement, or in certain circumstances preservation of wetlands, streams or other aquatic resources for the purpose of offsetting  unavoidable adverse impacts.”

Concept 2: How the Mitigation is Done

Mitigation generally means restoration, enhancement, creation, and preservation of a natural resource. So for wetlands, what is often served up as mitigation is nice piece of degraded wetlands, restored with some un-ditching or dam-busting, curvy-stream building, and water-loving plants. Who does the restoration? It’s either do-it-yourself (called permittee-responsible mitigation), or done by someone else–either an in-lieu fee program (a government agency or non-profit organization), or a mitigation bank (a for-profit company). The latter two types of mitigation accept funds and provide larger-scale restoration. Mitigation lands must be permanently protected by a conservation easement.

3. No Net Loss

Since a presidential mandate in the late 1980’s under  the Bush (H.W.) administration, the US has had a policy goal of “no net loss” of wetlands. Don’t impact more than you restore. But numerous studies have shown that ecologically, wetland mitigation isn’t as good as keeping what you’ve got in the first place. Here’s a meta-analysis (note that bigger restoration does better). For mitigation banks, I’ve often noticed a distaste that someone would make a profit on environmental restoration that comes at the cost of a loss of natural resources. The alternative then, is 1) to protest against issuance of permits to impact wetlands in the first place, and/or 2) to ensure that mitigation banks are held to standards as high as mitigation provided from government or non-profit sources. Ironically, mitigation bankers argued that other sources of mitigation were held to standards lower than theirs and successfully lobbied for equivalent standards in 2008 regulations. Bankers also note that they have a record of meeting 98% of their performance standards.

4. Wetland Mitigation Banking 102: Credit Stacking

Go to any conference on wetland mitigation banking or any other environmental market and there will be at least one session on credit stacking. This is a largely theoretical discussion about the opportunity for multiple credits (and implied, multiple payments) for multiple ecosystem services that a piece of land provides. If a land provides wetland functions and values AND endangered species habitat, why shouldn’t you be allowed to create multiple credits? You can, in some situations, but the criticism will come when you try to sell multiple credits without proof of additional services, functions, or financial investment.

So there you go. Four key wetland mitigation concepts. Here’s a bonus Neil deGrasse Tyson meme I made but I couldn’t figure where it belonged.

Holy Moly, there’s a lot of PES out there

See on Scoop.it – Nature + Economics

Why am I not in Portland? There are about a gazillion abstracts of academic studies, policy applications, corporate investigations, navel gazing, you name it, re: ecosystem services at the Ecosystem Service Partnership conference going on in Portland Oregon right now through August 4th. So I’m not there, BUT I will make this offer to folks out there: if you’d like my thoughts on a project during the conference, Skype me: [eerrrtt… offer expired]. Just mention that you’re at the Portland conference and I’ll accept your Skype request.

If you want to know what’s going on in the world of ecosystem services, take a gander through this list of abstracts. Some that pricked up my ears:

-Vital Graphics on Payment for Ecosystem Services: Realising Nature’s Value

-Using Economics to Value Ecosystem Services in Site Design [The Sustainable Sites Initiative™ (SITES™)]

-The 21st century utility: accounting for natural capital [“while utilities like Seattle Public Utilities can borrow money (by issuing municipal bonds) to build a filtration plant, they are unable to borrow against a major restoration project that would improve the health of the watershed asset and reduce the need for costly built infrastructure”]

-Addressing Ecosystem Impacts in LCA-based Ecolabels

-Green vs. Grey Infrastructure Analysis: Using Incentives to Connect Forests, Water and Communities

-Incorporating ecosystem services into hotel management strategies: A case study analysis of Bahías de Huatulco, México

-ES in DC: How to Talk to Washington Politicians

-Optimum Land Management for Species Protection Given Alternative Land Uses: Conservation Reserve Design within US Military Installations

-Automated Identification of Remediable Wetlands for Water Filtration and Biofuel

-Enlisting Ecosystem Services: Quantification and Valuation of Ecosystem Services to Inform Military Base Management—The Case of Ft. Lewis

-Prioritizing Natural REsource Management Planning Using Ecosystem Service Valuation: Case of Tennesee Valley Authority

-Incorporating Ecosystem Services into Socioeconomic Impact Analysis: A Practical Framework

-Valuation of water in hydroelectric generation [Iran]

-A Payments for Ecosystem Services Approach to Align County Payments with the U.S. Forest Service 2012 Planning Rule

-Recommendations on Developing Successful Ecosystem Services Projects to Support Military Training: Soliciting Ideas from Landowners, Conservation Stakeholders, Regulators, and Investors

-Framework for characterizing environmental sensitivities through the application of ecosystem services [ExxonMobil]

As well, if I were a global researcher, I’d take this as a starting point for finding out about PES programs globally. There are projects in here from the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Trinidad and Tobago, China, Uganda, and more.

See on www.espconference.org

The Value of Nature, Graphically

Lovely graphics, developed by Information is Beautiful for the Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S) Accounting for Sustainability Forum, held in December 2011 in the UK.
See larger image here.

See larger image here.

See larger image here.

Paying for Ecosystem Services, Part 5: Paying for itself, in the bottom line

Hey folks, back from a hiatus/vacation. Soon to come: photos of recreational value of ecosystem services of a family camping trip.

I’m doing a little catch-up with news from GoogleReader, my new Scoop.It Nature+Economics page, LinkedIn groups (my favorite is Business & Ecosystem Services Professionals), and newsletters in my inbox.

From the TEEBrief newsletter, I found out that PUMA’s CEO Jochen Zeitz had joined the TEEB team in an advisory capacity. And you know how you start linking… well, I found a speech of his from December of last year. The guy is really interesting. He wrote a book: Prayer, Profit and Principles with Benedictine monk, Anselm Grün. And he seems really committed to accounting for nature:

“The primary purpose of an Environmental Profit and Loss is to show managers and stakeholders where in an operation and its supply chain these impacts occur and their magnitude.”

The speech was made at a forum of The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S)… and clicking away to find out more about His Royal Highness’ project, I find this lovely little gem video that features CEOs talking about why it’s not just a good thing, but good for business to account for nature. So there you go, business paying for ecosystem services because it would be foolish not to. Great message.

Up on the Soapbox

I’m up on the soapbox on Ecosystem Commons, talking about communicating ecosystem services nature’s benefits. Check out the post here.

…adding to that train of thought, here’s another example of communicating nature’s benefits.

Freshwater scarcity even effects hockeCRASH!$*(*&^#&#^.      Photo by gordonhunter

Last year, the National Hockey League launched a “Gallons for Goals” campaign where they “pledged to restore 1,000 gallons of water to a critically dewatered river for every goal scored during the 2011-12 regular season.” I like the personal connection they communicate:

“Many of our players grow up skating on frozen ponds. Freshwater scarcity affects their opportunity to learn and play the game outdoors.”

-Bernadette Mansur, Senior Vice President NHL Green and Executive Director of the NHL Foundation

Bonneville Environmental Foundation provided the water restoration credits which helped the Deschutes river, Oregon. Are they the only water restoration credit game in town? Or are they the best at communicating water footprinting and offsetting? Look at this beauty:

Yummy graphics. Love it.