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Conference Summary
Keith Rozendal, NAKFI Science Writing Scholar
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Natural environments provide enormously valuable, but largely
unappreciated, services that aid humans and other earthlings. Civiliza-
tions rely on these intangible life-supports just as much as they rely on the
resources and produce extracted from wild and cultivated land and sea-
scapes. Agriculture—the cornerstone of large, complex human societies—
would collapse but for the reservoirs of clean freshwater, soil laced with
essential nutrients and microbes, and stable climates generated by natural
systems. It’s becoming clear that those life-support systems are faltering and
failing worldwide due to human actions that disrupt nature’s ability to do
its beneficial work.
Ecosystem services scientists work to document the direct and indirect
links between humanity’s well-being and the many benefits provided by
the natural systems we occupy. The knowledge they produce can structure
the way humanity, now surging past seven billion individuals, provides for
its exploding needs. It can shape decisions on land use, resource extraction,
manufacturing, and trade so that the widespread declines in the ecosystem-
rooted life-support systems can be arrested or reversed.
It seems that Spaceship Earth faces an “all hands on deck” emergency.
A boatswain’s distress call has been issued by the organizers of the 2011
National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) Conference on
Ecosystem Services. A broad community of academic researchers, indus-
trial and agricultural professionals, and policy experts responded. In 14
Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) Teams, biologists and earth scientists
collaborated with physicians, engineers, economists and a wide range of
1
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2 ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
social scientists—all were needed. As the chair of the conference steering
committee put it, “The only prerequisite was brilliance.”
IDR Team 1 explored the many ways in which human health requires
healthy ecosystems and the services they provide. In response to their
challenge, “How do ecosystem services affect infectious and chronic dis-
eases?,” the team boldly stated that all diseases have links to the health of
ecosystems. Though in general, infectious diseases have stronger links than
chronic diseases. Seeking the physical and biological processes that connect
ecosystem changes to health-related outcomes would be the critical first
task, once any relationship is uncovered. Team 1 was one of many to recog-
nize the huge numbers of interconnections between human and ecological
systems, coining the phrase “webs of causation” to best reflect their dazzling
complexity. The team observed that some diseases, like malaria, had already
been well-mapped by other interdisciplinary scientists, who may not realize
that their research fits into an ecosystem services framework. This led the
team to devise a “call to arms” bringing together researchers from specific
fields, such as epidemiology, urban planning, and atmospheric sciences to
work on this challenge under a common framework of health-supportive
ecosystem services.
Three teams under the IDR 6 banner explored ways to estimate the
overall value of the inventory of human dependencies on natural capital.
These teams recognized that the price currently paid for products, such
as food, does not include the values to society of the services provided by
nature. A “shadow price” would incorporate a full accounting of the social
costs and benefits of products and policies, and would most likely inflate
prices. However, this would require that economists grapple with a funda-
mentally different framework for pricing, one that can precisely reflect the
worth of hard-to-pin-down social, cultural, and ecological values. One team
memorably called the difficult-to-value end of the spectrum, “squishy.”
Economists do have well-developed methods to value things that don’t fit
into a traditional market framework. Two teams recommended applying
revealed preference analysis measurements to the task of comprehensively
valuing ecosystem services. Another said interactive social games could
expose the way any person values intangible ecosystem services by tracking
their choices among actions that create tradeoffs between different compet-
ing values.
Food demand will double this century, and agriculture already has
the biggest impact on the environment, by far. Three IDR 4 Teams
t ackled this problem. One team set out several achievements that
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CONFERENCE SUMMARY
together could meet future food demand without further depleting
soils, water, nutrients, or biodiversity—but only if all these goals can be
met simultaneously. They include putting a halt to deforestation, help-
ing farmers achieve the full potential yields of their lands, abandoning
meat-centered diets, and reducing food waste. Another team proposed
a few further goals for an ecosystem-maintaining food system and sug-
gested a design competition to identify key experiments to undertake.
The third of these teams extensively developed one such project, mass-scale
urban-based agriculture.
IDR Team 5 was challenged to imagine how humanity might aim even
higher than simply meeting future food demand. The lofty state of food
security isn’t merely concerned with food quantity. Food secure families eat
food of adequate quality to support an active life that promotes peak devel-
opment and healthy aging. This requires a shift in global farming priorities,
according to this team. Currently, food producers receive incentives and
supports to grow staple crops such as rice, maize, and potatoes. Such foods
can meet basic caloric needs, but true food security is built on diverse diets
of non-staple crops like fruits and vegetables.
Oil and natural gas, once extracted and burned, can never be replaced.
The Earth’s supply of phosphorous, an element critical to agriculture, is
also being mined to exhaustion. IDR Team 2 confronted the challenge of
developing new means of recovering such nonrenewable resources currently
going to waste. The team created a general purpose analytical tool called
an eco-interactome map, using it to track phosphorous from its birth in
mines to its end fate deposited in watersheds, soil, landfills, and human and
animal feces. Putting numbers to the map showed where the greatest losses
occurred with the biggest opportunities to recover phosphorous. The team
evaluated a long list of potential technologies to do the job and suggested a
pilot project: Using anaerobic digestion to treat animal manure produced
in concentrated animal feeding operations. Phosphorous could be recovered
from the treated waste with several add-on benefits.
Two IDR 7 Teams sought ways to consolidate and expand approaches
to ecosystem services so every federal decision might one day weigh these
concerns. One team said an interagency training center would harmonize
and improve the ecosystem services work already being done across the
federal system. Extending these practices into new decision-making areas
could start by modifying policies already in place. For instance, one team
recommended recruiting the Securities and Exchange Commission to re-
quire ecosystem services accounting within publicly traded businesses. One
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4 ECOSYSTEM SERVICES
team began to write a potentially historic bill, the Valuing Natural Capital
Act—a short and simple, but far-reaching law. But even this idealistic team
suggested practical first steps—starting with a measure that values natural
capital at the city or state level to build momentum for broader regulations
on its success.
In an age of globalization, national policies will never be enough to
fully account for the values humanity derives from nature. IDR Team 8
imagined ways in which the global trade system could begin to monitor and
reduce its impacts on ecosystems. The team used the term ‘policy’ elastically.
Certainly, the actions of governments and international bodies matter, but
actions by private parties and market-based mechanisms targeting corpora-
tions, producers and consumers can also dramatically shape international
trade. Take, for example, private sector roundtables, voluntary changes in
producer practices, certification schemes, and shareholder activism. Existing
import risk assessment policies could easily incorporate the value of ecosys-
tems. In such decisions, a given commodity might be banned for import
or levied with additional taxes on the basis of social, environmental, and
economic criteria.
IDR Team 3 looked at how human societies adapt to the abrupt
changes in ecosystem services following natural or technological disasters.
The team observed that proactive adaptation plans have only developed
where an urgent and widespread perception of vulnerability exists. Thus,
the team made a specific call for research psychologists to join the work on
this challenge. They identified factors that encourage or discourage societal
preparation and resiliency: Is the crisis caused by human actions, and over
what time scale and spatial extent does the event occur? Finally, the team
recommended developing a case study library and a game-based tool to help
people explore the range of options available for adapting large populations
to abrupt change.
For many of the proposals emerging from this year’s NAKFI to suc-
ceed, it seems essential that broad audiences understand the full value of
ecosystem services to human well-being. IDR Team 9 began to develop the
call for a National Academy of Sciences “PlanetWorks” conference. They
aim to bring government figures from the federal down to municipal levels
together with leaders of high-tech companies (especially the top Internet
firms), other big businesses, foundations, and the news and entertainment
industries. The conference would plant the seeds for a massive social net-
work dedicated to communicating worldwide the importance of incorpo-
rating ecosystem services and natural capital concerns into the way business,
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CONFERENCE SUMMARY
government, and our daily lives operate. The team imagined interactive
instructional games based on solid science and projects that engage big
crowds to gather data on ecosystem functioning. Because an ecosystem
services framework highlights nature’s impact on human health, values,
and wealth, there are natural “hooks” for engaging the common concerns
of a huge audience.
A theme threaded through the entire NAKFI Conference on Ecosystem
Services. Taking ecosystems services seriously reveals how fragmented and
self-defeating policies emerge from fragmented and competitive decision-
making bodies entrusted with social and economic planning. Perhaps,
just as the melded efforts of scientists speaking across wide disciplinary
boundaries can best meet the challenges posed at this conference, new com-
prehensive political bodies might better put ecosystem services goals into
practice locally and globally. Incorporating the value of ecosystem services
in planning for the future will foster fully informed, and one hopes, wiser
choices. This approach can make explicit the ecological sacrifices human-
ity has been making without knowing. It can lead the globe to account
for previously hidden benefits and losses, to think on geologic time scales,
and to respect the true complexity of the planet’s massively interdependent
natural systems.
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