Distilling and discussing the IPBES levers & leverage points for transformative change

14 months ago 132 nations agreed upon the pathways to sustainability. 

   These are the Levers and Leverage Points of the @IPBES #GlobalAssessment 

   They are far more provocative than they seem. This new paper in People and Nature explains why: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pan3.10124

 

Several accompanying pieces make different points:

1. Our blog response to Peter Bridgewater, handling editor at PaN.
2. My story in The Conversation
3. An IPBES podcast, which just aired on Wed.

 

Please share with potentially interested parties. If we’re going to re-orient societal efforts towards transformative change and sustainability, we will need agreement on how, and that it’s needed.

 

Why is this in People and Nature? As a Lead Editor, I have seen firsthand the excellent work done by my colleagues there. We are collectively working towards transformative change in academic publishing. It offers precisely what my coauthors and I sought: deep interdisciplinarity and consistently thoughtful reviewing and editing. Peter’s blog (above) offers a glimpse of how we were pushed in all kinds of productive ways. In a few weeks, I’ll also share a paper Terre Satterfield and I have been working on for 8 years, also in PaN.

CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

Economizing nature as a political strategy: Is it working?

A review of Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics. Jessica Dempsey. John Wiley & Sons, 2016. 296 pp., illus. $XX.XX (ISBN: 9781118640555 paper). Book review published in BioScience. Amazon.ca

Marc Tadaki and Kai Chan

The idea that we need to “sell nature to save it” has become somewhat of a truism in discussions about the conservation of nature. Financial flows change the world, the argument goes, and if conservationists can alter those flows, they can change the world. This has led, in recent decades, to collaborations between ecologists, economists and governments in attempts to mainstream biodiversity and ecosystem services into a variety of economic framings and tools. By bringing biodiversity into the domain of economic calculus, perhaps the inherently enterprising capacities of nature can be valued and preserved. In other words, by extending the market to include biodiversity, nature should save itself!

Enterprising Nature is the first book by Jessica Dempsey, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. In Enterprising Nature, Dempsey draws on over 10 years of research into global biodiversity politics to offer a fresh perspective to these ever-important debates about the financialization and commodification of nature. In simple terms, Dempsey sets out to evaluate whether “selling nature to save it” is actually working as a political strategy. By tracing the networks of people and ideas that have influenced conservationist arguments to commodify nature, Dempsey takes readers through a cumulative series of choices made by scientists and their collaborators that has resulted in framing the conservation “problem” within a market-based framework. In so doing, she provides a window into a room that many of us have long inhabited, but whose dimensions and dynamics we have never seen so clearly. Throughout this account, Dempsey points to other ways of framing local and global biodiversity that have been rejected and marginalized along the way. By revisiting these choices and their alternatives, she argues, a new global biodiversity politics can be envisioned, and perhaps, pursued.

The argument of Enterprising Nature is developed over eight concise but meaty chapters. The introduction sketches the contours of an emerging global discourse of an “enterprising nature” that seeks to bring biodiversity within economic tools and framings. In the first section of the book, Dempsey examines two major developments in the history of enterprising nature: the ecological thinking promoted by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and others in the 1970s and 1980s, and the work conducted within Stockholm’s Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics. Through these developments, scientists shifted away from a radical critique of capitalism to instead create an “ecological-economic tribunal for (nonhuman) life” (p57). This involves constructing an inventory of ecosystem functions and then assigning equivalences, weightings, and rankings to these functions so that certain functions can be prioritised for human needs.

The book’s second section examines contemporary international efforts to value biodiversity within a market framework. In the realm of global science and governmental policy, initiatives such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the decision-support tool InVEST are used to explore the assumptions, exclusions, and implications of embedding economic frameworks in policy settings. In the private sector, Dempsey then analyses attempts by scientists to represent biodiversity as a material risk to investment actors. This risk-based “venture ecology” (p128) is less concerned with making ecosystems into commodities, and more concerned with using ecological data to reduce risk and make a “smoother space for development” (p129). As an end-goal for conservation, then, venture ecology seeks only strategic degradation rather than large-scale rehabilitation of ecological functioning.

The third section of the book considers whether any of the promised finance is flowing from the institutionalization of these new economic instruments. Dempsey maps out the figurative ecology of biodiversity finance: its main ‘species’ of actors (e.g., NGOs, government agencies, bankers), their natural habitats of interaction, and their functions within the system. She draws on observations from conferences on biodiversity finance to consider the progress being made in attempts to economize and commodify biodiversity, noting the challenges and failures that characterise many of these attempts, including the failed proposal for a “Green Development Mechanism”. In the international policy arena, Dempsey reports her experiences of meetings under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity, analyzing how colonial histories and North-South power differentials justify parties’ resistances to contemporary proposals to create financial mechanisms for biodiversity conservation.

Dempsey concludes that the promise of “selling nature to save it” has born sparse and stunted fruit; that this promise is “Conceptually dominant, but substantively marginal” (p234). Rather than allying with existing elites and seeking to extend capitalist structures of extraction and exploitation, Dempsey argues that scientists should instead consider allying with green social movements, indigenous communities, and all those who are seeking to challenge the economic relations that have produced (and continue to produce) ecological devastation at a planetary scale.

The book is a must-read for environmental scientists who have long been immersed in a world where efforts to ‘enterprise’ nature (i.e., sell it, broadly) are seen as necessary politically, and where critics are too often dismissed as utopian dreamers. Dempsey cannot be dismissed so easily. Though the book is ultimately critical of attempts to economize nature, it is sympathetic to the scientists, economists, and others who have tried to leverage ecosystem services as a political strategy to halt and reverse ecological degradation. Dempsey’s most compelling doubts and criticisms are often our own, articulated through the surprising frank words of frontline proponents for ‘enterprising’ nature—e.g., wondering whether the ‘enterprising’ nature project has truly yielded much, for all the celebration, or claiming that ecosystem service markets are merely a fad. Dempsey even highlights the radical political implications of ecological science, while also drawing attention to the explicit and intentional choices that many scientists have made to ally with corporate and political power to make their case for conservation. Against these capitalist and elitist tendencies, Dempsey advocates for a “critical ecology” that will “discard dreams of mastery, to embrace highly dynamic, uncertain, and deep unknowns of the future” (p121), and that such an ecology should be “conducted… not to serve elite needs, but to serve [social] movements with a real chance of creating abundant, diverse futures” (p121).

The central challenge posed by the book lies in its prescription for conservation’s future success. Given that Dempsey, by her own admission, was always a sceptic of the neoliberal turn in conservation, readers may not be fully convinced by a journey that resulted in continued scepticism. Dempsey’s call for a grassroots politics of opposition to the fundamental capitalist forces causing environmental degradation may ring true but idealistic: of course it is needed, but can it redirect the juggernaut of global supply chains and consumer demands, when even the fiercest ecological activists cannot escape these relations? Ultimately we are all complicit in the destruction wrought by the capitalist logics of property, value, and profit, and many of us are already willing to challenge these fundamentals if given the chance. While emerging nuanced strategies seek to practically rework economic tools and logics in search of environmental justice, this book opts for an oppositional stance to financialization in toto, which may also prove constraining. However, nuances aside, the book does open these issues for discussion in a productive way, and for this reason it deserves a wide and engaged readership.

In sum, Enterprising Nature provides an empirically rigorous and analytically insightful assessment of the “selling nature to save it” hypothesis. Scientists, economists, policymakers, and conservationists of all stripes will benefit from this novel analysis of the interrelationships between biodiversity science, policy and finance. Dempsey excavates some important choices to scientists about how we choose to “do politics” through our science and through our alliances. With the terrain of biodiversity science and politics set to shift drastically over the coming years in the U.S. and internationally, more than ever conservationists need new and radical ideas; and this book provides some.  

An Economy for 2100

Helm, D. (2015). Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet, Yale University Press. 296 pp. (ISBN: 9780300213942).

[What appears here is the original submitted version of a book review appearing in the journal BioScience at dx.doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw056]

With excitement and also trepidation, I cracked open Helm’s new book, “Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet”. Would the book chart a path towards reformed economics that would actually nurture the planet for future generations? Or was it simply another advertisement for economic valuation of nature? I soon discovered that Helm delivered key components of the roadmap to an economy for 2100, leaving me wanting more.

Helm’s mission is bold and important. He seeks to provide a set of strategies for truly sustainable economic growth, while admitting that current trajectories are systematically flawed (both global and national, in virtually all nations). He seeks to persuade any reader of the necessity of this task—the neoclassical economist who sees no problem in environmental degradation (merely progress), and equally the naïve environmentalist who imagines that we can and must erase virtually all human impact on Earth. The book itself delivers a message neatly between these two extremes, but ambitiously so: a vision of sustainability between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ (maintaining aggregate natural capital), which includes a reversal of the environmental degradation we have seen to date.
Dieter Helm is undeniably ideal for this task. A professor at the University of Oxford, Helm is a deeply engaged economist in British policy. Indeed, Helm chaired that nation’s Natural Capital Committee from its inception in 2012, a committee that includes Georgina Mace and Ian Bateman, among other accomplished experts. The committee’s task is to implement a framework for economic growth that simultaneously both stops the decline in natural capital and improves this crucial foundation for the economy.

In four parts comprising twelve chapters and an introduction, Helm lays out his argument. He first describes the current state of the environment and its relation to the economy, that environmental degradation has real economic consequences, although these may be diffuse, delayed, and difficult to observe directly. He then addresses the question of what we collectively should be seeking, in order to treat future generations fairly. Here Helm proposes his aggregate natural capital rule, which is the conceptual foundation for the whole book. As alluded to above, Helm argues that ‘weak’ sustainability is too weak in allowing the whole-hog substitution of natural capital for built capital, but that ‘strong’ sustainability is too strong in allowing no such substitution. Helm’s compromise is to propose the maintenance and improvement of aggregate natural capital, which could be achieved by investing the revenues from non-renewable resource extraction into the restoration of renewable resources.

The third step is to outline the current set of policies and measures governing and accounting for natural capital and its contribution to the economy (e.g., gross domestic product, GDP), and why and how they are flawed. The fourth step proposes a suite of economic tools and policies that would enable the realization of the aggregate natural capital rule.

The book is well executed. I enjoyed the specific examples of heathlands and moors, including the one that opened the introduction. I appreciated the rigour of the scholarship, and the fluidity of the prose. I also appreciated the manner in which Helm anticipated many critiques, addressing many.
Natural Capital’s greatest contributions are threefold, in my view. First, many readers will be pleased to have a well-articulated economist’s argument for natural capital protection and restoration, and a sustainability rule that is stronger than ‘weak’ sustainability. Few of us can speak the language of neoclassical economics that dominates policymaking in most nations and many multilateral institutions, so having Helm’s convincing argument for this stronger position is reason alone that many concerned with the environment should buy this book. Particularly useful here may be Helm’s proposal for resource extraction endowments, following the logic of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which Helm would see put toward the restoration of renewable resource assets.

The second crucial contribution is Helm’s debunking of conventional national accounting and economic policy, and their basis in the flawed measure of GDP. Other volumes are devoted just to this issue, but I appreciated the way Helm lays it bare. Whereas many national governments debate the merits of fiscal austerity vs. Keynesian growth, by which a government bets on future economic growth to rescue national legers from current deficits, Helm seems to argue that both sides have it wrong. If national accounts such as GDP fail to reflect the depreciation of natural capital, which is pervasive in Britain and elsewhere, growth (be it Keynesian or with austerity measures) cannot be sustained—because natural capital is the ultimate asset, the source of all wealth.

The third great contribution is the discussion of the suite of economic tools and policies for achieving truly sustainable growth, including damage compensation schemes and the utilities/trust model for governing common-pool resources and public goods. The utilities model, by which a private or public organization takes responsibility for maintaining key infrastructure (e.g., electricity transmission and distribution lines) and derives revenue from the provision of a needed service (e.g., electricity supply), has worked quite well for water and also—as Helm argues—public parks. Helm extends the model to river catchments, for example, whose revenues could include insurance rebates associated with improved flood mitigation (an ecosystem service enhanced by watershed restoration). It is an intriguing idea that deserves close scrutiny from policymakers everywhere.

Every contribution, no matter how great, also has shortcomings, of course. No one volume can do all, and all of it well. The three most important gaps, in my opinion, are the justification for the aggregate
natural capital rule, the treatment of valuation, and the treatment of the implementation of these important policies.

Helm’s aggregate natural capital rule has two important components, and both encounter difficulty. The first component is the substitutability of improved renewable resources for the non-renewable ones used up, which Helm argues must be measured in monetary terms: “For non-renewables, there is no possible physical substitution, so depletion can be measured only in economic terms.” This claim overlooks the fact that non-renewable resources are not wholly lost, rather converted to less useful forms. Fossil fuels are rendered into carbon dioxide and other by-products; and metals are locked up with other chemicals. In both cases, substitutability could quite easily and naturally be measured in terms of energy potential or exergy, and given the uncertainties associated with monetary metrics in the long run, this might be preferable.

The second component is the substitutability of some renewable resources for others, which Helm allows (e.g., rare habitat for great-crested newts to be substituted for more available nightingale habitat), with insufficient justification. Helm argues for this on the basis of ethics and practicality, but he never expresses the ethical argument, only the practical one, “There will be further economic development. It cannot be stopped.” Even if we accept this premise, it does not follow that we must allow all manner of economic development to proceed, e.g., even if it threatens the last remaining habitat for great-crested newts. Counterarguments would include responsibilities to non-human species (which I have argued for, for all organisms--Chan 2011), and the inappropriateness of assuming that because we have no particular need for such newts, neither will future generations. I see justification for substituting newt habitat for newt habitat, but not nightingales for newts.

The second gap is Helm’s treatment of valuation, which is supposed to be grist for deciding that, e.g., nightingale habitat is a worthy substitution for newt habitat. Helm’s justification here is far too quick, “Benefits require valuation, and the units are explicitly or implicitly money. Hence a price has to be put on nature.” A full response is well beyond the scope of this review, but suffice to say that benefits do not always need to be valuated to enable good societal choices (Vatn & Bromley 1994; Gregory et al. 2012; Ruckelshaus et al. 2015); just because you can derive an implicit price after the fact does not mean that a priori valuation is generally applicable or helpful (McDaniels & Trousdale 2005); and important classes of benefits cannot be valuated appropriately in monetary terms (Chan et al. 2011; Chan et al. 2012). An associated disappointment here is that whereas Helm rightly touts the importance of his approach being an asset-based one (rather than a services- or benefits-based one), he offers no guidance for the special challenge of valuating assets beyond the too-simple assumption that the value of the asset is simply the value of the current uses extended into the future. Accordingly, Natural Capital is overly focused on valuation and pricing when neither needs to be central, and it doesn’t entirely deliver its promise of a truly assets-based approach.

The third gap is that Part Four, “How Can It Be Done?” leaves this key question entirely unanswered. Instead, this section reminds us what good can be anticipated to come from restoration, and reviews important ideas about finance that were already covered extensively in Part Three, “What Needs to Be Done?” Helm himself details the challenge of politics and lobbyists for thwarting good economic policies, but it will fall to other volumes to propose how such policies might transform from fiction to fact.

All told, Helm’s bold volume achieves a great deal in its autopsy of current growth-obsessed economic policies and its blueprints for an economy for the 22nd Century. Now for the hardest part: building the economy Helm imagines.

References

Chan, K. M. A. (2011). "Ethical extensionism under uncertainty of sentience: Duties to non-human organisms without drawing a line." Environmental Values 20: 323-346. http://dx.doi.org/10.3197/096327111X13077055165983

Chan, K. M. A., J. Goldstein, T. Satterfield, N. Hannahs, K. Kikiloi, R. Naidoo, N. Vadeboncoeur and U. Woodside (2011). Cultural services and non-use values. Natural Capital: Theory & Practice of Mapping Ecosystem Services. P. Kareiva, H. Tallis, T. H. Ricketts, G. C. Daily and S. Polasky. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press: 206-228. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Economics/Policy/?view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780199588992

Chan, K. M. A., T. Satterfield and J. Goldstein (2012). "Rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values." Ecological Economics 74(February): 8-18. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800911004927

Gregory, R., L. Failing, M. Harstone, G. Long and T. McDaniels (2012). Structured Decision Making: A Practical Guide to Environmental Management Choices. Hoboken, NJ, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. http://books.google.ca/books?id=pU8-YgEACAAJ

McDaniels, T. L. and W. Trousdale (2005). "Resource compensation and negotiation support in an aboriginal context: Using community-based multi-attribute analysis to evaluate non-market losses." Ecological Economics 55(2): 173-186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2005.07.027

Ruckelshaus, M., E. McKenzie, H. Tallis, et al. (2015). "Notes from the field: Lessons learned from using ecosystem service approaches to inform real-world decisions." Ecological Economics 115: 11-21. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913002498

Vatn, A. and D. W. Bromley (1994). "Choices without prices without apologies." Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 26(2): 129-148. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069684710084

Can IPBES Make Ecosystem Service Assessments Useful? Yes (from Nicoya)—with A Few Key Tweaks

by Kai M. A. Chan
Part of a series of posts about IPBES (the UN's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and an inside look at its processes.

I stare mesmerized out the airplane window at the verdant green sharp hills, sinuous rivers, smooth beaches and glimmering oceans of Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. As I stare, my mind wanders to my friends and colleagues flying into Turkey for the second plenary of the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES; which I blogged about here and here). Again and again, my mind returns to a central point: can IPBES help policymakers and practitioners—like those I sat with over the last two days in a sweaty Costa Rican university classroom—make and justify wise decisions to protect this 'pura vida' landscape from the downsides of the pressures that encroach?

Costa Rica’s west coast from the air—so mesmerizing
I almost missed my opportunity for a photo.

One might imagine, as many do, that Costa Rica is a well-protected paradise. It is. But it too is subject to immense pressures from a variety of economic, social, and political forces, and it too is desperately seeking insight about the social-ecological changes that loom on the horizon, and what might be done to steer the nation on a continued trajectory toward sustainable prosperity.
Back to the central question of the promise of IPBES. I vividly replay Ann Bartuska relating her experience of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) as a policymaker. One morning some thousand-plus pages were plopped down on her desk. The next week, a colleague of hers involved in the MA called her and inquired how it was going to change the decisions that federal agencies were going to make. She didn’t have the faintest clue, and while she didn’t quite say this, I got the impression that she’s still wondering.

It’s not that the MA wasn’t tremendously useful—it was. It put some core ideas (like the concept of ecosystem services, ES) on the map, and on the radar screen of countless researchers, policymakers and practitioners. But because it was so pioneering, it was too static and too coarse to inform many particular decisions. If IPBES is to build significantly on that groundwork, it must significantly advance the practice and use of ES research.

New tourist developments in the Nicoya Peninsula may be the
reason we foreigners visit, but they are also sucking water from
other uses, causing saltwater intrusions, and displacing local
people from their customary cultural uses of the shoreline.

With ES research, there is a surprising gap between understanding of nature’s contributions to people, and how that understanding is being applied by policymakers, corporations, and NGOs. To cut to the chase, my argument here is that IPBES can significantly help close that gap in three ways.

In Costa Rica, as in many cases, what's needed is an understanding of how what matters to people would be affected by change. In the case of our brand new project in the Nicoya Peninsula, we are focusing on climate change and associated hydroecological changes, but we’re also considering new tourist developments and changing agricultural practices.

Best practice for ES research gets at this directly. Conceptually, it's actually very simple. The research should involve:

The vast expansion of sugar cane
plantations changes the landscape,
both hydrologically (through irrigation)
and socially.

•    Understanding how the relevant components or processes in nature ('ecological endpoints') are likely to change due to the change in question (call it X).
•    Understanding how social change associated with X might change access and demand for these things. (This is a relatively new point, which I and others have been pushing hard in recent years—e.g., here.)
•    How much the resulting changes in diverse ES (including the above changes in supply, access, demand) matter to people, ‘valuated’ in terms that lend themselves to be integrated into decision-making.

It's puzzling: although the first and third points are well-established best practice from over a decade ago, they are not being taken up in research (as Terre Satterfield and I show in manuscript being revised) or in policy or practice. Instead, ES research is mostly either about the biology (often not the change) or about the value of whole ecosystem components or processes (not the value of how they are likely to change). It’s less surprising that the newer second point is not being taken up.

Policymakers and practitioners are no better. Furthermore, the poor progress in research is connected to the apparent demand for simplistic ES assessments. Environmental assessments, for example, seem to pay lip service (at best) to the idea of ES, and almost never include ES impacts, e.g., to compare with other costs and benefits. From my experience with NGOs of all sizes, citizen groups, and government agencies at all levels (from municipal to international), it seems that the vast majority of demand for ES research does not clearly target ES change. Accordingly, the result is often simple assessments of standing stocks—often ES valuation without underlying basis in social or ecological change.

I never thought I'd say this, but I think there's a golden opportunity for an intergovernmental body (IPBES) to leverage large-scale change through simple interventions.

IPBES is a major new effort that is poised to undertake some extremely important work. And I've seen firsthand the passion, intellect, and savvy of those involved (reported here).

At the moment however, IPBES seems to be fueling the fire of current demand for superficial ES science. How? In three unintended ways. By (1) considering biophysical assessment only separate from valuation assessment; (2) being apparently silent on the need to characterize the social changes in demand and access; and (3) treating non-monetary and monetary valuation options as separate alternatives.

Local people used to use the beaches—for their own purposes,
some key to their cultural identity—where foreign tourists now
have obvious priority. Now the local presence is for the pleasure
of selling beach-side massages.

Regarding (3), non-monetary and monetary valuation metrics are not alternative methods for valuating the same things. Instead, there are some changes (or aspects of changes) that can and should be valuated in monetary terms, such as the material property damage associated with floods. While there are real economic effects, we cannot pretend that the resulting monetary values also capture the emotional upheaval of dislocation or the spiritual losses associated with certain cherished things.

It would take but small changes to the current proposed IPBES docs to provide specific guidance about how to do ES valuation (of biophysical and social changes) as outlined above. It basically involves turning (1)-(3) on their heads, explicitly calling for and guiding the characterization of biophysical and social change and their integration with valuation, and also providing guidance on the integration

I have seen how such guidance from IPBES could make a tremendous difference. Not through the assessments, but rather through the recommendations for how agencies and organizations ought to do assessments for their own purposes is exactly what these agencies and organizations most look to IPBES to provide.

An interdisciplinary group (just a portion of the FuturAgua team
assembled by Tim McDaniels) assembles to strategise. From left
to right, Douw Steyn, Jennifer Romero, Silja Hund, Mark Johnson,
Raffaele Vignola, Cam Webster, and Paige Olmsted.

In my mind’s eye, we fast-forward three years. Paige Olmsted and I, with the rest of our research team, are presenting just such an assessment of ES change in the Nicoya Peninsula to the regional government officials, and representatives of various stakeholder groups with whom we are cultivating budding relationships. It may be wishful thinking, but I can see their bright eyes and excited nods as they imagine a half-dozen ways they can take this information and change policy and practice.