Transcriber: Silvia Rivera Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic
We all know that we receive benefits from nature,
but have you ever tried to list them out?
To identify them, assign values to them
or actually trace them back, to particular landscapes that give rise to them.
Most of us probably don't go through this exercise
on a regular basis if ever.
But the answer to these questions is fundamental to our ability
to manage our landscapes, for both sustainability
and for improved quality of life.
But to answer these questions, I need to know,
what values you assign
to wetlands,
streams, forests, fields?
And this question isn't particularly easy to answer,
if you think about it.
We all have familiarity with assigning a value to a pint of maple syrup
or a glass of water.
But, what's the value of the maple trees that produced that syrup,
or the forest where maple trees grow?
Is the value of the forest equal to the value of the maple syrup?
Probably not.
Forests produce a lot of other services,
and we could sit and think about them for a minute.
We can think whether it is – board field lumber it produces,
or they generate other food, fuel-fiber type resources, firewood –
These all have market values,
so, again, it's relatively easy to look up at the values
or think about them, or think about trading them.
But what about the elements,
the services that we get from this ecosystems
that aren't necessarily material,
that aren't part or the structure,
but rather functions
of the greater structural complexity of these systems?
That is – what is the value of a forest as a forest
as opposed to the value as a piece of lumber?
So, that's an important question to think about.
So if we can think about things like,
forests absorb carbon dioxide from the air,
thereby medicating greenhouse gas emissions and climate change –
they produce oxygen that we can breathe,
they retain nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen,
as well as sediment, keeping them out from water ways
to keep them clear.
They provide habitat for biodiversity
and they provide endless recreation opportunities for us.
We can think of all these kinds of things.
So, maybe we can get at a lower bound for value
for a given forest, if we try to add up
the individual contributions of each of these different elements
to our well being.
So we can try and do that.
But now we are still faced with a more fundamental problem,
which is that – we're talking about questions of value,
and we're talking about value,
we're talking about people's perceptions of worth,
which, been held subjectively, vary widely across populations,
culture, generation, ethnicity, any number of things,
we can think about these axes.
So, that means extremely, extremely difficult to assign
blanket values, generalized values to a given landscape,
because the services that they generate are valued
by different people in different places at different times.
So, that's the problem space that we want to play with here.
So, if we're thinking about this localization of the problem,
maybe a more important question, or a different way to phrase this,
is not to ask ourselves, or is not to try and say,
"The value of a service from forest is x,"
but rather to say,
"The value of this service from this forest is x to these people,"
and to get specific.
So, in that spirit, for the last few decades,
our researchers in ecosystems services area
have been traveling around the world
and surveying people about the values
they assign to the services of nature.
But, obviously these things are time consuming
and they are expensive.
So it's extremely difficult to get very much data here.
There are databases built up on these things,
specially in the last decade –
we've started to see some databases emerging that you can query
and try to get an idea of what the literature says
about some of these different kinds of values –
these, again, socio-economic values that we're playing with.
But, we don't think even remotely close to global coverage,
nowhere near. And at the same time,
especially in the last five to six years, we've seen a major upswell
in institutions of both the public and the private sector,
begging for global coverage of ecosystems service information
that they can use for their land management decisions,
and run scenarios against.
So, as we've already seen, we do have a lot of [due] a spatial data now.
That's kind of a new big fun thing in ecosystems services world –
we're not just limited to doing these one off surveys,
because we can actually do these secondary
meta-level evaluations of the data.
And what we get to do with this – we get all this geospatial data,
we put it together, and now what we can do in filling these gaps,
is we can actually try and create functions
that go in and study the structure in the data
of the landscapes and the people, the cities, the community centers,
the roads, all these kinds of structures,
and try to pull out with these signature functions,
where services are likely to be produced,
and where there's probably demand for them.
But, once you've applied these kinds of functions,
you still don't necessarily know –
if you know where the supply might be,
and you know where the demand might be
in any given landscape, once you've run these functions –
you still don't know if any service is being delivered.
So, what we have to do there –
is we take the landscapes, we project this information
about likelihood of supply and demand up on to a network,
and then we start flowing around, we simulate in our computers
across all this geospatial data.
We simulate the flow of, what we call "service carriers",
so things like bees for pollination services,
or carbon dioxide moving around, water moving for flooding
and wild-fire, water supply, water quality, any number of things.
You move it across the landscape and you try actually see –
given any particular topographic variables,
what is the service flow topology, any given area,
and thereby, you can finally answer the question:
Who receives services from where in any given landscape?
And that's extremely powerful, if you have that kind of information.
So, the kinds of things you can answer with that, now –
So, for example, you can finally show maps like this,
where the green areas here are like
[repeated sound of] on the top, and over here you have a mountaineer,
and we're looking at scenic views –
So the impact of scenic views on different properties –
for the red, on the top there, is the city of Kent.
And so you can try and see:
Who receives services from where, and to what degree?
And the yellow stuff is visual blight –
You can actually look at the degree to which individual properties
are being impacted in terms of their service,
because of the way landscapes configure.
And you can run scenarios against this
to try and actually, really answer questions about
who wins and who looses on different management scenarios?
So you say, on a development scenario one,
this group of people gained something,
a different group of people gains a little bit more,
and this third group of people gets hurt.
Whereas under development scenario two, if I develop in this area,
well, it turns out that everybody gets hurt a little bit,
but if I develop in the third area, everyone benefits.
This is really becoming very interesting
in the US, in particular, the EPA has this entire research divisions
entirely turned around to ecosystem service research these days;
the US GS has a very big program in that;
the US GA has an office of ecosystem services and market –
just started off a few years ago under this administration,
and so on and so forth.
So, our government's all into it.
We're seeing a lot of ecosystem service work,
starting to find its way into public policy in the EU.
And I'm participating in some projects in Africa as well,
for the Gund Institute right now,
where this stuff is also coming into play.
So, we're hoping that taking this kind of technology
to finally connect people to the landscapes,
the actual landscapes, which generate their services,
will really help us to better inform,
better land management in the future for all of us.
Thank you.
(Applause)