Ecosystem services as a concept has risen to the fore since its early development as a pedagogical concept in the 1970’s. It has subsequently been mainstreamed into the literature, which has sought to calculate the economic value of ecosystem services as an academic exercise (Gómez-Baggethun, de Groot et al. 2010). Despite its foundation as a tool to increase interest in conservation, it is now becoming increasingly influential in economic policy making, as demonstrated by its adoption in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2003; Gómez-Baggethun, de Groot et al. 2010) and the UK’s recently published National Ecosystem Assessment (Assessment 2011). As a result of the rapid uptake of the ecosystem services discourse in the political sphere, payment for ecosystem services is now being rolled out in the UK and other countries at great speed. Yet at the same time there is a growing critical literature on the validity of the logic of applying such utilitarian and market driven concepts to nature.
In this context, the contribution to the literature made by (Robertson 2004) is both timely and important. Under Chicago’s marketized wetland mitigation banking system, large ‘consolidated’ mitigation banks - set up in advance of impacts, sold credits to developers in order to enable real estate land area to be fully developed. This allowed ecosystem services to be offset at the lowest cost prices and a supposed ‘free market’ in credits to be created. A key pillar of any such system is the valuation process that enables the commoditization and capitalisation of environmental phenomena. To do so, ecological data must be articulated and translated, or coded, so as to make it legible to the logic of capitalism through institutional structures.
For credits to have legitimacy and a consistent value in a market system they must be given these qualities by scientific investigation and to be functional for capital, a commodity must be alienable, fungible, and mobile. Wetland banking, and ecosystem science presents challenges for all of these in what has been called a double movement: the need for greater precision for market expansion, whilst ecosystem sciences complexity at finer levels of analysis becoming ever less amenable to generalised abstractions necessary to fulfil the qualities outlined above.
Commensurability in tradable credits presents a major challenge for several reasons. First, a comparable measurement system between impacts and mitigation must be in place. However, from a practical regulatory standpoint, this level of analysis is not plausible and so an area-function approximation is made. Likewise, spatial commensurability for ecosystem function and temporal maintenance (i.e. measured against a counterfactual future) is a fundamental limitation, thus limiting the mobility of wetland credits and making valuation difficult.
Robertson (2004) also highlights another fundamental problem with ecosystem services as a concept for conservation, that of governance. The maintenance of markets and the ecosystems they relate to is dependent on a consistent regulatory framework which compels the purchase of credits and thus places value on ecosystem function. Such regulatory market systems must be large to enable efficiencies of scale and regional commensurability. Fundamentally, for conservation, markets must be maintained as many wetland banks are not necessarily ‘natural’ in a biogeographical sense. The collapse and disaggregation of the Chicago wetland banking system provides a cautionary tale in this respect by contrasting the discord between the flitting temporal scale, impermanence and instability of market systems, with that of ecosystems which operates over longer timescales and which are harder to replace.
But does this count the concept of ecosystem services out as a useful tool for conservation? And should the concept be entirely discounted as another reckless neoliberalisation of nature? A case study of UK peat lands suggests not. In Devon, South West Water in collaboration with Exmoor National Park, Natural England, the Environment Agency, English Heritage, local farmers and landowners; has recently made a £27m+ investment in the restoration of greater than 200ha of uplands as part of a new focus on “catchment management”.
The rationale behind this from a business perspective was the large ongoing cost of energy and chemical treatment necessary to remove organic tannins from upland waters, done not for health purposes but for public acceptance of the waters appearance. The concentration of tannins in the water was believed to be attributable to century’s old process of moorland drainage, oxidation and degradation, characteristic of uplands in many parts of the UK. Healthy peatlands also play an important role for water storage capacity and flood peak modulation, both of which are a high priority for water companies and the EA.
From the point of view of the other stakeholders in the process, moorland restoration has been a desirable conservation objective for a long time, although the financing was always a fundamental limitation. From a national perspective, the developing discourse and strengthening international legal framework around carbon accounting, combined with strong national emissions targets and the recognition that peatlands are “probably the most important terrestrial carbon store in the UK”(Worrall, Chapman et al. 2010). Has lead to increasing support for peatland restoration and protection as a national priority.
In this case study, the concept of ecosystem services is still the driving logic as is the lowering of costs for business (South West Water); however the issue of commensurability is diminished by the spatially fixed nature of catchments and their role as unique sources, stores and water quality moderators for an individual business. Catchment management offers a lowest cost solution as opposed to hard engineering for water treatment, storage and flood protection. For the UK water industry steeped in a tradition of engineering conquest of water, this is a revolutionary concept.
For this case, ecosystem services and functioning as a whole catchment unit becomes a direct priority for capital. The result is investment that provides positive externalities in the form of carbon storage and habitat restoration in addition to the services targeted by the water company.
Although I have no doubt that the interplay between the regulatory agencies, state, local and business priorities, and the biophysical nature of peatlands is more complex than I have portrayed (and I would like to investigate deeper). What I have aimed to illustrate is that there are circumstances where the application of ecosystem services as a financially driven concept has utility and direct conservation benefits.
As with so many narratives in Political Ecology, generalisation is a mistake and context is king.
Assessment, U. N. E. (2011). The UK National Ecosystem Assessment: Synthesis of the Key
Findings, UNEP-WCMC, Cambridge.
MA, M. E. A. (2003). Ecosystems and Human Well-being: A Framework for Assessment.
A nice lead from Robertson to the Uk case. The question is of course under what conditions do ecosystem service payments work for social equity and for environment and when do they not work...you illustrate this in your commentary
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