Gretchen Daily
"Sustainability & Ecosystem Services: A Systems Perspective"
Thursday, May 31, 2001, 12:30 PM
Dr. Gretchen Daily is the Bing Interdisciplinary Research Scientist in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Daily’s work is aimed at helping to develop a scientific basis for managing Earth’s life support systems, supported by appropriate institutions and policies. Her primary scientific efforts concern the future of biodiversity. She is investigating both the likely course of extinction and novel opportunities for conservation in human-dominated agricultural regions, particularly in the tropics. She works on a variety of groups of organisms including butterflies, birds, and mammals. She is also assessing the likely societal consequences of biodiversity loss and other ecosystem transformations. In collaboration with a diverse group of academicians (including economists and legal scholars) and members of the private sector and government, Dr. Daily is forging new policy approaches to securing protection of critical aspects of Earth’s life support systems. She is coauthor of The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable, The Stork and The Plow: The Equity Solution to the Human Dilemma, and editor of Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems. In 1994 she was named a Pew Fellow in Conservation and the Environment.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Gretchen Daily began with the question: Why do people think we’re so unique? There are many wonderful things about Homo sapiens…and some bad things….
But biologists are bored with this question and the litany of attributes that are trotted out to characterize the species. To biologists Homo sapiens are just another fascinating animal.
Granted we’re a species whose population has increased six-fold from one billion individuals in 1850 in ever quicker billion-person increments. We went from five to six billion in only 11.5 years. Now that’s interesting to population biologists.
And we now use 50% of the world’s land, and over 50% of the world’s renewable fresh water. By the year 2030 we’ll likely be using 70-100% of the latter. Once abundant resources are in short supply: a single tuna fish fetches $185,000 in Tokyo. In the last 1000 years we’ve lost species 100 to 1000 times faster than in the rest of human history, and it’s estimated we’ll lose 50% of the world’s remaining species in the next century. We control in some significant way every square centimeter of the planet. We’re the zookeepers. That’s interesting to an ecosystem biologist.
Given this one species’ domination of the earth’s biological systems and current downward trends in biodiversity (the number and distribution of genes, individuals, species, relationships, processes and ecosystems at various "scales") some basic questions arise:
What will biodiversity look like in 30 to 100 years?
What do we want it to look like?
How do we do this?
Dr. Daily has been asking what levels of diversity “country-side” habitat can support.
For example, one graph shows biodiversity declining when habitat is lost. But if you restore (or preserve) habitat then biodiversity should increase. Now here’s the question. Which of the three lines best represents the relationship between habitat area and number of species? If it’s the top line, you get a big increase in species when you restore or preserve a small amount of habitat, but if it’s the bottom line, you don’t get much for your initial restoration effort.
So which is it? Well, it depends on where you are and what organisms you’re talking about. Dr. Daily has been working in Costa Rica and the US to figure out which animals can get by with fragmented, small reserves (at one site half the birds, three quarter of the mammals, and all the butterflies do fine in small-fragment habitats), and which ones need bigger reserves.
If we can figure these relationships out –not an easy task– then how do we allocate habitat and other resources? Remember this is a zero-sum game. We’re not going to stumble upon any more habitat or resources.
One approach to this allocation question is to use an ecosystem services framework for protecting nature. This framework looks at nature in a way that appeals to people’s economic self-interest. What are ecosystem resources? The list is long but it can be simplified into four categories:
1) Goods – fish, timber, grasslands, pharmaceuticals, etc.
2) Life support services – breathable air, drinkable water, pollination, waste management
3) Life-fulfilling things – lions, greenspaces, clean beaches, songbirds
4) Options – at the species, ecosystem, and evolutionary levels.
To convince the non-ecologist that ecosystem services exist, Dr. Daily asked one question and provided one example.
Example: Biosphere II, the attempted answer to the question above, failed miserably.
Question: If you were going to go live on the moon, assuming an atmosphere and not much else, what would you take? (Short answer: a mind-boggling list of stuff that’s supplied “for free” here on earth.)
Dr. Daily then described some first-cut approaches to characterizing, valuing, accounting for, and safeguarding earth’s ecosystem resources.
For example:
New York City recently opted for a $1.5 billion watershed restoration/preservation approach to providing drinking water by helping Catskill watershed residents and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure, practice sustainable forestry and agriculture, fence off streams, keep cows in sun-houses rather than run-off prone feedlots, etc. The alternative: $6-8 billion in filtration infrastructure.
If you scale this approach up to the entire United States, assuming an average of 1/3 hectare needed for each of us, that comes to 10% of the country’s area needed to protect our water using an ecosystem services approach versus an infrastructure approach. Worldwide, a similar approach would require about 23% of the earth’s land surface area.
Dr. Daily revisited a case that many of us heard last year from Dan Janzen: the use of a waste product –orange pulp- to restore degraded land in the Guancaste National Park in Costa Rica (unfortunately, a rival user of the orange peels is suing to stop this practice).
Another example from Costa Rica: Rural land-owners are being paid $43 to $58 per year per hectare, for preserving forest land, with the bulk of this value deriving from carbon sequestration services paid by European countries, but with value also assigned to water, biodiversity, and life-zone conservation.
An example from western Australia: This “fruit-basket” region has only two percent of its native forest remaining, and the lack of native vegetation has resulted in salts being brought to the surface by rising groundwater. Australia is considering a scheme where landowners would see as much as 45% of their revenue come from providing ecosystem services such as water management, timber, carbon sequestration, salinity control and biodiversity, with the remaining 55% of income coming from traditional crop and animal production.
How real is all this? Dr. Daily showed a scientist’s healthy skepticism and a policy-maker’s cautious optimism that the ecosystem services concept can be used to recognize the value of nature and to allocate resources for protection and restoration. The key question from her perspective is: now that we have a framework and some solid examples, can we scale up?
For more information about Dr. Daily’s work, visit Center for Conservation Biology website.
Summary of the pre-lecture discussion:
A group of approximately 20 gathered to discuss three articles prior to Gretchen Daily’s talk. The discussion was led by Mike Houck, Urban Naturalist, Audubon Society of Portland and Noelwah Netusil, Associate Professor of Economics at Reed College.
Mike started off the discussion by describing his view “from the trenches.” He emphasized the importance of incorporating ecosystem services into urban design to create a functioning urban ecosystem.
Noel focused on the different kinds of values attributed to ecosystem services. These values include (1) the provision of production inputs, (2) the sustenance of plant and animal life (generating both direct and indirect use values), and (3) the provision of non-use values. The market-based valuation techniques (replacement cost, market prices) commonly used to estimate these values and the nonmarket valuation techniques (travel cost, hedonics, and the contingent valuation survey method) were briefly described.
Numerous questions and comments focused on the need to estimate values to provide a more balanced discussion of resources. Concerns were expressed about the downside (philosophical issues as well as the practical issues of using the valuation techniques) of placing a value on resources.
Daily, Gretchen C. et al. 2000. "The Value of Nature and the Nature of Value" Science, 289: 395-396.
Houck, Mike. 2000. Urban Wetlands and Greenspaces As Urban Greenfrastructure: Building Livable Communities. Oregon State University Fall Seminar Series (October 30).
Lutzenhiser, M. and N.R. Netusil. 2001. The Effect of Open Space Type on a Home’s Sale Price: Portland, Oregon Contemporary Economic Policy, 19 (1): 291-298.
Books:
The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable (2002)
"Why shouldn't people who deplete our natural assets have to pay, and those who protect them reap profits? Conservation-minded entrepreneurs and others around the world are beginning to ask just that question, as the increasing scarcity of natural resources becomes a tangible threat to our own lives and our hopes for our children. The New Economy of Nature brings together Gretchen Daily, one of the world's leading ecologists, with Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, to offer an engaging and informative look at a new 'new economy,' a system of recognizing the economic value of natural systems and the potential profits in protecting them." - Alibris.com
Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (1997)
"Nature's Services brings together world-renowned scientists from a variety of disciplines to examine the character and value of ecosystem services, the damage that has been done to them, and the consequent implications for human society. Contributors present a detailed synthesis of our current understanding of a suite of ecosystem services and a preliminary assessment of their economic value. Nature's Services represents one of the first efforts by scientists to provide an overview of the many benefits and services that nature offers to people and the extent to which we are all vitally dependent on those services. The book enhances our understanding of the value of the natural systems that surround us and can play an essential role in encouraging greater efforts to protect the earth's basic life-support systems before it is too late." -Alibris.com
The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Solution to the Human Dilemma (1995)
"The authors outline ways to manage the resources of the world to sustain the growing human population citing examples of policies and how they work or do not work. Their solutions are sensible, but will require that those of us who live in developed countries to change many of our consumptive habits." -Alibris.com
Lectures, Interviews & Articles:
"The New Economy of Nature" Orion, Spring, 2002
Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison
Gretchen Daily on the Earth & Sky Radio Show, October 17, 2003
Gretchen Daily in Mother Jones, Nov/Dec 1994
