The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Foundation, Stanford University Launch the Natural Capital Project:  Project to Revolutionize Ecosystem Management Practices Worldwide

October 31, 2006

To: National Desk, Environment Reporter

Contact: Steven Ertel of The Nature Conservancy, sertel@tnc.org or 703-841-2652, or Tom Lalley of World Wildlife Fund, tom.lalley@wwfus.org or 202-778-9544

Washington, D.C. /U.S. Newswire/ - The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) and Stanford University today announced the launch of an innovative partnership that aims to change the way governments and policy makers think about nature worldwide.

The program, called the Natural Capital Project http://environment.stanford.edu/ideas/ncp.html is an unprecedented effort to calculate the economic and other benefits nature provides to people -- so-called "ecosystem services" such as clean water, flood control and climate regulation.

By answering the question, "What is nature worth to people?" the Natural Capital Project highlights the many ways in which the world's forests, grasslands, arid lands, freshwater systems and oceans, support their daily lives.

"This exciting project brings together the expertise of leading field conservationists and a world-class university," said Steve McCormick smccormick@tnc.org or 703-841-5300, president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. "Recognizing that ecosystems should be protected for their intrinsic values as well as their economic values will help us prioritize the conservation of the world's natural systems. This, in turn, can help improve the quality of life for people throughout the world."

Ecosystem services can include everything from soil fertility to clean air to pest control. These services are essential to human health. As the world's natural resources are depleted through unsustainable land-use practices, important ecosystem services are being lost at an alarming rate. The impact is greatest felt by the world's poorest people, who cannot afford to buy or replace the resources they are losing from nature.

Two groundbreaking scientific papers, authored by scientists from Natural Capital Project partner organizations, were published in PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology today. http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=index-html&issn=1545-7885

These papers are the first to show how ecosystem services can influence the outcomes of conservation planning efforts.

Research led by Kai Chan kaichan@ires.ubc.ca or 604-822-0400 at [the] University of British Columbia and Rebecca Shaw http://www.switzernetwork.org/dirdetails.taf?id=368 rshaw@tnc.org or 415-281-0480 of The Nature Conservancy suggests that, in California, biodiversity conservation is highly compatible with the protection of ecosystem services upon which Californians depend and should be included in systematic conservation planning.

And research led by Robin Naidoo at WWF (The World Wildlife Fund) revealed that -- based on a study of a landscape in Paraguay -- the economic benefits of conserving forests exceed the benefits of farming the same land in many areas.

Chan's paper can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040379 and Naidoo's paper can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040360.

"Learning to map the economic values of nature will give us the information we need to conserve ecosystems for the benefit of biodiversity and people. That's what these papers and the Natural Capital Project, are about," said Taylor Ricketts, director of WWF's Conservation Science Program and co-author of one of the papers. "Our early results indicate that the benefits of conservation can far outweigh costs and that if land owners could capture the value of ecosystem services, like carbon storage, conservation can be a profitable use of land."

The Natural Capital Project will begin working with local partners in three pilot areas -- the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/tanzania.html, the upper Yangtze River Basin in China http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/china_prim.html and the Sierra Nevada region in California http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/california.html -- to assess the value of the ecosystem services and to then help incorporate those values into policies and resource decisions.

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The Nature Conservancy is a leading international, nonprofit organization that preserves plants, animals and natural communities representing the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit them on the Web at http://www.nature.org.

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World Wildlife Fund is the largest conservation organization in the world. For 45 years, WWF has worked to save endangered species, protect endangered habitats and address global threats such as deforestation, over fishing and climate change. Known worldwide by its panda logo, WWF works in 100 countries on more than 2,000 conservation programs. WWF has 1.2 million members in the United States and nearly 5 million supporters worldwide. For more information on WWF, visit http://www.worldwildlife.org.

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Related reading/information:

Natural Capital Project

About

Governments, businesses and other organizations routinely use cost-benefit analyses to select among policy alternatives and identify worthy investments. Unfortunately for the biosphere and the humans who rely on it, these cost-benefit analyses rarely reflect natural capital, or the living and non-living resources of nature on which humans intimately depend.  Natural capital includes forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and grasslands, from which flow a stead stream of economically-valuable “ecosystem services”.

Ecosystem Services: The conditions and processes through which ecosystems, and the species that make them up, sustain and fulfill human life. Examples include production of goods (seafood, crops, and timber); life-support benefits (clean water, climate stability, flood control, pollination); life-fulfilling benefits (aesthetic and other cultural inspiration); and preservation of options.

Unlike financial or social capital, natural capital tends to be undervalued, not well known, and degraded rapidly, causing significant harm to ecosystem services (Millennium Assessment, 2005).  If we do not aptly value ecosystem services, we will bankrupt our natural assets and end up doing more harm than good, in spite of the best of intentions.

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/about.html 

Toolbox

The Natural Capital Project is developing a suite of tools that will allow practitioners and decision makers to identify projects or decisions that could benefit from an ecosystem services approach, and then support design of policy instruments or financial mechanisms that contribute to more equitable and profitable decisions that align biodiversity conservation and human well-being.

Modeling and Mapping Ecosystem Services

We are currently developing a practical software system to serve these needs, with a focus on carbon storage, hydrological services (water quantity, quality, timing of flows), and biodiversity. The package consists of several modules that allow the user to develop scenarios to represent possible futures that may arise from a decision (Scenario Module and Policy and Finance Module), visualize and quantify ecosystem processes under different future scenarios (Biophysical Module), consider economic and social conditions to quantify the market and non-market values of ecosystem processes in each scenario (Valuation Module) and analyze social, economic and environmental differences between scenarios to identify trade-offs and synergies among all sectors.

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/toolbox.html

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/california.html

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/china_prim.html

http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/tanzania.html

http://environment.stanford.edu/ideas/ncp.html

http://www.conservationbiology.org/jobs/detail.cfm?id=7446

Rebecca Shaw, Director of Conservation Science and Planning, The Nature Conservancy
 
201 Mission Street, 4th Floor

San Francisco, CA  94105

Rebecca Shaw is the Director of Conservation Science for The Nature Conservancy in San Francisco and Visiting Scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology on Stanford University’s campus. As Director of Conservation Science, she is responsible for incorporating the best available scientific information into the full array of TNC programs and managing an interdisciplinary team of scientific and technical experts. Through partnerships with academics and government agency partners, her team’s research projects focus on incorporating climate change impacts and economic return into conservation priority setting and conservation planning for ecosystem services, marine systems and migratory species. Prior to joining TNC, Rebecca conducted research at the Department of Global Ecology on the impacts of global change on ecosystems processes and biodiversity. The results of her research have been published in leading academic journals including Science and Nature. She received her M.A. in environmental policy and her PhD in energy and resources from the University of California at Berkeley.

Keywords: ecosystem ecology, environmental education, population, environmental policy, community political activism

http://www.switzernetwork.org/dirdetails.taf?id=368

Kai Chan

I am an assistant professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at University of British Columbia. I do research in two main areas: the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of ecosystem resistance to invasions and infestations, and conservation planning for ecosystem services. Invasive species and population outbreaks of native species cost society dearly, and devastate ecosystems. Yet we know relatively little about how we can guard against these disruptions pre-emptively, bolstering the critical ecosystem service of infestation resistance. In general, we need to do a far better job of planning for ecosystem services, which are so critical for sustaining and fulfilling human life. If you're a prospective student, please see my projects at my IRES page.

I was recently a postdoctoral fellow with Gretchen Daily and Paul Ehrlich at the Center for Conservation Biology (CCB) at Stanford University. My research there had two major components: countryside biogeography (the study of biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes) and conservation planning/finance (the design of conservation tools). I was a Ph.D. student under Simon Levin at Princeton University, where I studied the process of diversification, and collaborated with Brian Moore. I was also a policy fellow, and did ethics research with Peter Singer.

Our responsibilities to current and future persons and the natural world call for us all to be social and environmental advocates and activists. At Princeton, I coordinated Greening Princeton; at Stanford, I was a senior fellow at scienceinpolicy.org (to improve the use of science in policy); and I am a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program.

Contact Details:

Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability, UBC (The University of British Columbia)
AERL, 438 - 2202 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada

kaichan@ires.ubc.ca
604-822-0400

Fax: 604-822-9520

My CV (pdf)

http://www.ires.ubc.ca/personal/kaichan/