Our Uncommon Heritage€¦ · 1.1 Biodiversity 1 1.2 The Holocene extinction 8 1.3 The challenge for biodiversity science 12 1.4 Science and policy at the crossroads 19 1.5 The challenge

Our Uncommon Heritage

Biodiversity change is the biggest environmental problem of our time. Itleads to much more than species extinctions, affecting the food we eat, thediseases we face, our vulnerability to fire and flood, and our ability to adaptto climate change.OurUncommonHeritage explores the many dimensionsof human-driven biodiversity change. It integrates ecology, economics, andpolicy to examine the causes and consequences of changes in ecosystems,species and genes, and to identify better ways to manage those changes. Itexplores the place of biodiversity in the wealth of nations, the rights andresponsibilities people have for natural resources at local, regional,national, and international levels, and the challenges faced in protectingthe common good at the global level. This is an important book for studentsand researchers in the fields of conservation and sustainability science,ecology, natural resource economics and management. It also has much tosay to those engaged in international conservation, health, agriculture,forestry, and fisheries policy.

charles perrings is Professor of Environmental Economics atArizona State University, where he directs the Ecoservices Group – aresearch (and research training) group that focuses on ecosystem services.He was for several years vice-chair of the international biodiversity sci-ence research program, DIVERSITAS, and more recently represented theInternational Council of Science in negotiations with national govern-ments to establish the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform onBiodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

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Our Uncommon Heritage

Biodiversity Change, Ecosystem Services,and Human Wellbeing

charles perrings






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pages cmIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-107-04373-2 (hardback)1. Ecology – Economic aspects. 2. Biodiversity – Economic aspects.3. Ecosystem services. 4. Environmental economics. I. Title.QH541.15.E25P47 2014577–dc23

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To Ann, for bringing more than just light into my life











Contents

List of figures page xi

List of tables xiv

Foreword by Partha Dasgupta and Georgina Mace xvii

Preface xxvii

List of acronyms xxxvii

1 Biodiversity change 11.1 Biodiversity 11.2 The Holocene extinction 81.3 The challenge for biodiversity science 121.4 Science and policy at the crossroads 191.5 The challenge for conservation 221.6 A roadmap 23

Part I Diagnosing the biodiversity change problem 37

2 Biodiversity in the modern world 392.1 Widening horizons 392.2 Agriculture and biodiversity 402.3 Biodiversity and disease 522.4 Wildlife conservation 592.5 Finding the balance 68

3 Biodiversity and ecosystem services 783.1 Biodiversity, ecosystem services, and the market 783.2 Origins of ecosystem services 803.3 Ecosystem services in the Millennium Ecosystem

Assessment 843.4 Ecosystem services and biodiversity 923.5 Changing environmental conditions: a digression

on climate 95

vii






3.6 The valuation of ecosystem services 983.7 Scratching the surface 109

4 Biodiversity loss, sustainability, and stability 1194.1 Sustainability and stability 1194.2 Measures and models of biodiversity 1224.3 The portfolio effect 1264.4 The portfolio effect and sustainability 1324.5 The biodiversity portfolio 139

5 Biodiversity externalities and public goods 1485.1 Market failures and biodiversity externalities 1485.2 Identifying the social cost of externalities and public

goods 1515.3 Biodiversity as a “layered” public good 1575.4 Strategic behavior and the provision of international

environmental public goods 1635.5 Biodiversity-related international public goods 1715.6 Externalities and public goods in context 177

6 Poverty alleviation and biodiversity change 1846.1 Stating the problem 1846.2 Poverty and environmental change 1866.3 Modeling the relation between income growth

and biodiversity change 1916.4 Biodiversity and poverty alleviation 1986.5 Conclusions 206

7 Globalization: trade, aid, and the dispersal of species 2147.1 Globalization and biodiversity 2147.2 Globalization and the cost of biological invasions 2187.3 The invasive species risks of trade 2277.4 The regulation of trade-related biological invasions 2317.5 System-level effects of species dispersal 2347.6 Conclusions 238

Part II The search for solutions 249

8 Getting the prognosis right 2518.1 Understanding the “anthropogenic” in

anthropogenic biodiversity change 251

viii Contents






8.2 Biodiversity scenarios 2548.3 Current prognoses 2628.4 The International Science-Policy Platform on

Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2648.5 Social indicators of biodiversity change 2698.6 Biodiversity change and social wellbeing 273

9 Understanding what is lost 2809.1 Indicators of the importance of biodiversity change

for human wellbeing 2809.2 The value of environmental assets 2829.3 Adjusted net savings and wealth estimates 2879.4 Assets in the system of national accounts 2949.5 Satellite accounts and the capital accounts in the

system of national accounts 2969.6 Towards the construction of inclusive wealth

accounts 301

10 Managing risk, uncertainty, and irreversibility inbiodiversity change 30910.1 The unknowns in the problem of biodiversity

change 30910.2 Decision-making under risk 31310.3 Decision-making under uncertainty 31610.4 The precautionary principle and decision-making

under uncertainty 32110.5 Learning 32510.6 Decision-making under uncertainty

and biodiversity change 328

11 Conservation incentives and payments for ecosystemservices 33711.1 Externalities and public goods revisited 33711.2 Internalizing biodiversity externalities 34011.3 Markets for habitat conservation 34411.4 Designing payments for ecosystem services 35711.5 The incentive effects of international payments

for ecosystem services 362

12 Paying for international environmental public goods 37012.1 International environmental public goods 370

Contents ix






12.2 The Global Environment Facility 37312.3 The national provision of biodiversity-related

international public goods 38112.4 The private provision of international

environmental public goods 38612.5 Coordination 391

13 Strengthening the biodiversity-related multilateralagreements 39813.1 Identifying the biodiversity-related multilateral

agreements 39813.2 The Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi

targets 40213.3 Negotiating the relationship between trade and

biodiversity change 40813.4 The problem of resources beyond national

jurisdiction 41613.5 The problem of scale revisited 428

14 Genetic resources and the poor 43614.1 Biodiversity loss and poverty revisited 43614.2 Rights to the genetic resources of wild-living

species 44214.3 Rights to the genetic resources in domesticated

species 44614.4 Rights, and the conservation of genetic resources in

poor regions 45214.5 Private affluence, public poverty 457

15 Redirecting biodiversity change 46415.1 Assembling the pieces of the problem 46415.2 Refocusing conservation 46615.3 Knowing what is happening 46815.4 Enhancing the efficiency of biodiversity markets 47115.5 Reducing the biodiversity costs of poverty

alleviation 47515.6 The abrogation of common heritage rights 47915.7 The uncommon heritage of humankind 481

Index 491

x Contents






Figures

1.1 Global patterns of net change in overall extinction riskacross birds (1988 to 2008), mammals (1996 to 2008),and amphibians (1980 to 2004). page 11

2.1 Change in forest area by country, 2005–2010. 422.2 The share of non-agricultural activities in GDP and share

of total labor force in agriculture, 2007. 472.3 Vavilov centers of origin. 502.4 The demographic transition. 552.5 Biodiversity hotspots. 654.1 The portfolio effect, showing the impact of species

diversity on the trade-off between expected yield andvariance in yields. 130

4.2 Commodity food price index, 2005 = 100, includes priceindices of cereals, vegetable oils, meat, seafood, sugar,bananas, and oranges. 134

4.3 World cereal production index, 2004–2006 = 100. 1355.1 Socially and privately optimal level of employment of an

input with negative externalities. 1535.2 Socially and privately optimal conservation, where

conservation is a public good. 1565.3 The payoffs to conservation in a three-country world

with a two-country threshold of provision. 1695.4 Payoffs to conservation in a three-country world with a

two-country threshold of provision but no mechanismfor coordination. 169

5.5 Payoffs to conservation in a three-country world with athree-country threshold of provision. 170

6.1 Relation between the number of threatened species andper capita income. 197

6.2 Quantile and OLS regression estimates for threatenedspecies. 199

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6.3 Annual population growth rates in more developed andless developed countries, 1950–2010. 204

6.4 Rural population growth rates by income group,1950–2010. 204

7.1 Merchandise trade as a percentage of GDP for differentincome groups. 218

7.2 Air travel departures by income group, 1970–2009. 2197.3 Proportion of alien species that are harmful. 2269.1 Gross national savings and adjusted net savings rates

(percent), 2008. 2919.2 Adjusted net savings rates: high-, middle-, and

low-income countries plus HIPC, 1970–2008. 29210.1 The optimal balance between mean and variance in the

return on a portfolio of species. 31410.2 The optimal portfolio of species does not necessarily

result in the most stable (least risky) yield. 31510.3 False negative and false positive errors under maximin,

minimax regret, and asymmetric-minimax-regretstrategies with no learning. 327

10.4 False negative and false positive errors under maximin,minimax regret, and asymmetric-minimax-regretstrategies with learning. 329

10.5 Proportion of land area under protection by region,1990–2010. 331

11.1 Internalization of the external benefits of localconservation effort. 340

11.2 Internalization of the external costs of local conservationeffort. 342

11.3 Growth of wetland and stream mitigation andconservation banks in the USA, 1987–2009. 347

11.4 Countries implementing agro-biodiversity schemesinvolving payments to farmers. 351

11.5 Countries implementing PES schemes involvingpayments for the regulation of water supplies. 352

12.1 The basic allocation of shares in the GEF Trust Fund overthe first five replenishments, by country. 376

12.2 Incremental cost of increasing local conservation effortto assure the supply of the global public good. 378

xii List of figures






12.3 Total CDC budget ($ billion (axis 2)), and the percentageof the budget allocated to global health and infectiousdisease programs (axis 1). 385

12.4 United States Global Health Initiative: focus countries. 38713.1 The growth of MEAs, 1950–2009. 39913.2 Notifications under the SPS Agreement citing animal

diseases and zoonoses, 1994–2012. 41413.3 Regional seas and associated LMEs. 42214.1 Incidence of extreme rural poverty by region,

1988–2008. 454

List of figures xiii






Tables

1.1 Percentage of species in each IUCN Red List categorythreatened for all vertebrates and all completely orrandomly assessed non-vertebrate and plant groups. page 10

2.1(a) Proportion of terrestrial area nominally protected. 632.1(b) Proportion of territorial waters protected. 64

2.2 World tourism growth, 1990–2010. 673.1 Ecosystem services identified by the MA. 853.2 Changes in ecosystem services, 1950–2000. 903.3 Valuation methods applied to ecosystem services. 1013.4 TEEB estimates of the maximum value of twenty-two

ecosystem services in eleven biomes. 1065.1 Ecosystem services that are international environmental

public goods. 1726.1 Regional and global poverty estimates. 1906.2 Estimated coefficients in models of the relation between

threatened species (mammals, birds, and plants),income, population, area, and biodiversity aid. 196

7.1 Economic losses to introduced pests in crops, pastures,and forests in the USA, UK, Australia, South Africa,India, and Brazil. 221

7.2 Environmental losses to introduced pests in the USA,UK, Australia, South Africa, India, and Brazil. 222

7.3 Areas of missing or overlapping responsibility forinvasion pathways identified by the CBD. 233

8.1 Change in land cover in 2050 in four scenarios. 2568.2 Examples of biodiversity scenario studies highlighting

methods used to calculate impacts of global change onseveral biodiversity metrics. 258

8.3 Indicators of some of the social precursors ofenvironmental change. 271

xiv






9.1 Standard and externality-adjusted total factorproductivity (TFPG). 288

9.2 SNA environmental assets. 2959.3 SEEA environmental assets. 2989.4 Methods used to estimate asset values in the SEEA. 3009.5 Changes in natural capital: average annual growth rates,

1990–2008. 3029.6 Components of comprehensive investment (in 2000 US$

billion). 30411.1 Factors behind the efficiency of selected PES schemes. 35411.2 Effectiveness of different mechanisms for the provision of

environmental public goods. 35812.1 GEF Trust Fund, fifth replenishment of resources: table of

contributions, in special drawing rights (million SDRs). 37412.2 Aggregate expenditure on protected areas by region

($ million). 38812.3 Gates Foundation grant commitments (1994–2009) by

global health program area. 39113.1 CBD obligations under Article 8. 40313.2 The CBD’s Aichi targets. 40413.3 Overlap in membership of WTO and MEAs containing

specific trade obligations. 41113.4 Areas acquired by coastal states as EEZs. 41813.5 RFMOs. 42414.1 Rural poverty. 44014.2 Ex situ collections, 2008. 456

List of tables xv











ForewordPARTHA DASGUPTA* AND GEORGINA MACE**

The economic development that was initiated by the IndustrialRevolution has been self-consciously intensive in the use of naturalresources. The pace has not slowed. Since the end of the SecondWorld War, even as world population and average income per personhave grown at unprecedented rates, humanity’s reliance on naturalresources in large measure has increased correspondingly. During thetwentieth century world population grew by a factor of four (to morethan six billion) and world output by fourteen, industrial outputincreased by a multiple of forty, and the use of energy by sixteen.Methane-producing cattle population grew in pace with human pop-ulation, fish catch increased by a multiple of thirty-five, and carbon andsulfur dioxide emissions rose by a factor exceeding ten. Vitousek et al.(1986) estimated that some 40 percent of the 45–60 billion metric tonsof carbon that was then being harnessed annually by terrestrial photo-synthesis (net primary production of the biosphere) was being appro-priated for human use.

In this century the pace has accelerated. The release of nitrogen to theterrestrial environment from the use of fertilizers, fossil fuels, andleguminous crops now well exceeds that from all natural sources com-bined. Carbon concentration in the atmosphere is currently rising at arate of 1 part per million a year, the concentration having just passed400 parts per million, a level not reached since more than two millionyears ago. The scale of the human enterprise is so influencing globalenvironmental change now, that as Ehrlich and Ehrlich (2008)

* Chairman, Scientific Advisory Committee, International Human DimensionsProgramme; Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

** Chairman, Scientific Advisory Committee, DIVERSITAS; Faculty of LifeSciences, University College London

xvii






documented, we should recognize humankind as earth’s dominantspecies. Humanity would appear to have ushered in a new geologicalepoch in which our activities are influencing not only local landscapesbut also the global processes driving the earth system. Appropriatelyenough, the present era has recently been christened Anthropocene(Steffen et al. 2011).

Nature as an asset

Nature is a mosaic of capital assets. It comprises assets of intrinsic value(sacred groves, for example), those that are direct sources of humanwellbeing (the air we breathe and the water we drink), and many othersthat have indirect value as inputs in the production of goods andservices (crops providing food, and trees providing timber and energy).In fact nature’s services are inputs in everything we do. The problemis that nature is degradable. Agricultural land, forests, watersheds,fisheries, freshwater sources, estuaries, the atmosphere – more gener-ally, ecosystems – are assets that are self-regenerative, but suffer fromdepletion or deterioration if exploited without care.1 The term “self-regenerative” should not be taken to mean that natural resourcesregenerate in isolation when left untouched by humans; for nature’scapital – or natural capital – consists of an interconnected body of assetsundergoing change over time in size and character. The potential regen-erative capacity of one depends on the mosaic of which it is a part.The processes driving those changes differ in spatial scales, operate atdifferent speeds, interact with each other, and are almost invariablynon-linear. It should be no cause for surprise that nature is complex.

Human activities affect nature’s processes just as nature’s processesinfluence the choices we humans make. The mutual influence is sopowerful today that, for many scientists, talk of “nature’s processes”makes little sense. To them “socio-environmental” is a more appropri-ate way to describe the intertwined processes. A few broad principlesunderlying the processes are understood; but the devil lies in the details,and the details affect the daily lives of households everywhere.

Stresses in the system are often described as “environmental prob-lems.” They are problems of the environment, largely resulting fromhumans’ influences on them; they are rarely also problems due to the

1 We are ignoring subsoil resources in this account.

xviii Foreword






environment. Some are global while many are spatially localized, someoccur slowly and may therefore miss detection until it is too late, whileothers are all too noticeable and a cause of persistent societal difficulties.That may be why there is frequently a tension in the sense of urgencypeople are known to express about carbon emissions and acid rains thatsweep across regions, nations, and continents; about the stresses com-munities face when, say, grasslands transform into shrublands; andabout declines in firewood and water sources that are specific to theneeds and concerns of the poor in small, village communities.Moreover, socio-environmental processes are very poorly understood.For these reasons environmental problems present themselves differ-ently to different people. Some identify environmental problems withpopulation growth while others identify them with the wrong sorts ofeconomic growth. Then there are those who view the problems throughthe spectacle of poverty in poor countries. Each of those visions iscorrect. There is no single environmental problem; there is an innumer-able collection of them.

Economics and the environment

These observations may appear as obvious empirical truths, buttwentieth-century economics saw them as neither obvious nor, moreimportantly, truths. Macro-economists, who are in the business ofstudying production and consumption in the aggregate, went furtherby building theories of economic growth and development that almostinvariably took the inputs necessary in economic activities to berestricted to manufactured capital (roads, building, machinery, equip-ment), human capital (education, skills, health), and knowledge (arts,humanities, and the sciences). Nature was left out of the account. If thelacuna was mentioned, a typical response from growth economistswould be that it was in the character of development processes thattechnological progress overrides the effects of diminished and degradednatural capital.

To be sure, micro-economists have long noted the presence ofnatural capital. A large, informative body of work in the field ofenvironmental and resource economics has pointed to the need forpublic policy in the form of taxes and regulations to correct forhumanity’s excessive use of natural resources. (Economists uncoveredreasons why, in terms of human interest, our use of nature is almost

Foreword xix






always excessive, rarely insufficient.) Nevertheless, even environmen-tal and resource economists have mostly studied natural resources inisolation. Their account could give the impression that in the world weinhabit it is possible to pluck one resource at a time. The interconnect-edness of the constituents of natural capital and the mutual (non-linear) influences among the socio-environmental processes thatcome allied to it are rarely probed.

It could be that growth and development economists have neglectednature because the services it provides are taken to be luxury consump-tion goods, as in the view expressed some years ago in two prominentnewspapers that “economic growth is good for the environmentbecause countries need to put poverty behind them in order to care,”and that “trade improves the environment, because it raises incomes,and the richer people are, the more willing they are to devote resourcesto cleaning up their living space.” The idea here is that environmentaldegradation is a mere irritant.

The idea is a deep, cosmopolitan misconception. It is a misconceptionbecause nature’s services are critical inputs in consumption, production,and leisure, a fact that is self-evident to any agrarian person.

Wealth and wellbeing

That mistaken viewpoint has infected the public understanding ofeconomic development. Macro-economic forecasts routinely excludenature as an input in economic activity. Accounting for nature, if itcomes into the calculus of forecasts at all, is an afterthought to the realbusiness of doing economics. That most commonly used economicstatistic for judging the progress or regress of nations, gross domesticproduct (GDP), does not record the use to which nature is put ineconomic activities. If a wetland is drained to make way for a shoppingmall, the construction of the latter (including expenditures incurred fordrainage) is deemed to contribute to GDP, but the destruction of theformer goes unrecorded. If the social value of the former in absoluteterms exceeds the social value of the latter, the economy will havebecome poorer (wealth will have declined), but GDP will tell us other-wise. The popular and seemingly more humane Human DevelopmentIndex (HDI) of the United Nations (UN) adopts the same point of view:by neglecting to account for environmental changes, it misleads in thesame way.

xx Foreword






The rogue word in gross domestic product is “gross.”Depreciation ofcapital is not deducted from final output and this is a reason why theindex misleads when used as a reflection of human wellbeing. The pointis that an economy’s GDP could be made to grow simply by mining itsassets. So GDP could grow even as the economy was becoming poorer.The moral is simple, even banal: if we are to study the sustainability ofdevelopment processes, we should be estimating movements in wealthand its distribution relative to population, not per capita GDP, not theHDI. By a near-identical reasoning it can be shown that the coin withwhich changes in public policy (such as expenditure on new investmentprojects) should be evaluated is also wealth and its distribution relativeto population.

Ecosystems as assets

An economy’s wealth is the societal worth of its assets. It follows thateconomic problems are asset management problems. Of immediate anddirect interest to human populations are ecosystems, which range inspatial extent from biomes, to lakes, to spoonfuls of rainwater collectedon leaves of tropical plants and trees. In an important publication, theMillennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) reported that fifteen of thetwenty-four large ecosystems that had been studied in detail were foundto be either degraded or subject to unsustainable use.

The character of ecosystems, for example their capacity to supplygoods and services of use to humanity, can change relatively fast. Suchflips share three important characteristics: (1) they are frequently irre-versible (or at best they take a long time to recover from); (2) except in avery limited sense, it is not possible to replace degraded ecosystems bynew ones; and (3) ecosystems can collapse abruptly, without much priorwarning. Imagine what would happen to a city’s inhabitants if theinfrastructure connecting it to the outside world were to break downwithout notice. Vanishing water sources, deteriorating grazing fields,barren slopes, wasting mangroves, and bleached coral reefs are spatiallyconfined instances of a corresponding breakdown among the rural poorin poor countries. Ecological collapse, such as has been experienced inrecent years in Rwanda, the Horn of Africa, and the Darfur region ofSudan, can also come about in tandem with rapid civic decline.

A feature of significance of any ecosystem is the diversity of species. Ina magisterial treatise on the diversity of life, Wilson (1992) reviewed

Foreword xxi






evidence on current species extinction rates to conclude that humanityhas triggered a process that compares with the five great global extinc-tions that have taken place over geological time. Recent syntheses ofdata and trends suggest that indeed current extinction rates are on thebrink of what would formally count as a mass extinction (Barnoskyet al. 2011).

Determining the functional value of biological diversity – biodiversityfor short – is a deep and difficult matter but the consensus now is thatdiversity of species and biological forms contributes positively to manyecosystems and functions and to their resilience under changing pres-sures (Cardinale et al. 2012). When ecologists speak favorably of bio-diversity, which they do in unison and with regularity, there is animplicit assumption that the diverse species have co-evolved underselection and represent more than a simple headcount of species.When the Nile perch was introduced into Lake Victoria, the diversityof species increased, but did not last for long. The lake, as a fishery, wasdevastated.

Biodiversity is a key to ecosystem productivity and the resilience (thatis, stability) of that productivity. By “productivity” is meant the pro-duction of biomass. The total productivity of a population of species isgreater than the sum of the productivities of the individual speciesgrown in isolation. This reflects the non-linearity of environmentalprocesses and owes itself in part to the fact that species’ populationsin an ecosystem play complementary roles; they cannot all be substitutesfor one another. This has the corollary that to invoke the idea ofsubstitutability among natural resources in order to play down theusefulness of biodiversity, as is not infrequently done by growth econ-omists, is a wrong intellectual move. For if biodiversity is necessary foran ecosystem to continue providing services, the importance of thatsame biodiversity cannot be downplayed by the mere hope that forevery species there are substitute species lying in wait within that sameecosystem. Here it is useful to recall the analogy in Ehrlich and Ehrlich(1981) relating species populations in an ecosystem to rivets in an air-plane. One by one, perhaps, species may disappear and not be missed,for there is spare capacity (in part “species substitutability”).Eventually, though, the cumulative effect of biodiversity loss will leadto the crash of ecosystem functioning (“species complementarity” willkick in), just as the cumulative loss of redundant rivets will lead to thecrash of an airplane. In a recent symposium Barrett, Travis and Dasgupta

xxii Foreword






(2011) reported that biodiversity loss has been closely connected to thepersistence of rural poverty in Africa.

It remains a popular belief that the utilitarian value of biodiversity islocated primarily in the potential uses of the genetic material it harbors(e.g. for pharmaceutical purposes). Preserving biodiversity is seen as away of holding a diverse portfolio of assets with uncertain payoff. Butbiodiversity is vastly more valuable: it is essential for the maintenance ofa wide variety of services on which humans depend for survival bothnow and for the future.

The economics of ecosystems

As ecosystems are assets, why can they not be adequately managed bythe kinds of institutions that oversee the production and use of suchassets as machinery and equipment? In particular, why can markets notsuffice? One reason stands out (there are other reasons): natural capitalis oftenmobile. The wind blows, rivers flow, fish swim, birds and insectsfly, and even earthworms are known tomove. That means that propertyrights to prominent classes of natural capital are not just difficult toenforce; worse, they are difficult to define. As no one is responsible fortheir management, their use gives rise to “externalities,” which are theunaccounted for consequences for others – including future people – ofdecisions made by each of us.

What kinds of institutional arrangements should we seek to create forthe management of natural capital? In which ways are they likely todepend on the specific nature of the ecosystem in question? Do institu-tions governing the management of local ecosystems that have provedto be relatively successful in traditional societies offer hints on howglobal resources such as the atmosphere as a carbon sink could begoverned? If not, why not? Do simulated markets offer humanity apossible mode of governance? If so, which kinds of ecological capitalwould be most appropriate for them? Why can societies not rely simplyon environmental taxes, subsidies, and regulations? Most importantly,who should govern the assets?

Our uncommon heritage

Although environmental and resource economists in recent years havestudied many of these questions and have offered tentative answers,

Foreword xxiii






they have done so in a case-by-case manner. We do not have a treatise-length account which traces the answers to the socio-environmentalprocesses that are shaping our lives and defining our hopes and anxi-eties for the future. In his classic work, Wilson (1992) did not offer astudy of the human institutions that have permitted, even encouraged,the extinction process to which he was at pains to alert the world. Nordid he seek to identify the kinds of public policy that are now required.But then, neither of these was his goal, which required someone expertboth in the science of biodiversity and ecosystem services and in eco-nomic analysis.

It is against this background that Charles Perrings’s work at theinterface of ecology, economics, and environmental policy has been sosignificant. In this book he has put together the ideas that he and othershave developed over the years to present the full breadth and depth ofthis important science. His book is the natural successor to Wilson’streatise. Perrings offers an account that is lucid throughout andpresents analyses that are never beyond the reach of the engagedreader. We write this foreword as chairs of two global environmentalchange programs, one focusing on biodiversity science, the other onhuman dimensions. The time has come for these two closely linkedstreams of science to come together to solve environmental problemsfor the benefit of current and future generations. Doing this effectivelywill rest on the foundations, insights, and future directions laid downin this book.

References

Barnosky, A.D., Matzke, N., Tomiya, S., Wogan, G.O.U., Swartz, B.,Quental, T. B., Marshall, C., McGuire, J. L., Lindsey, E. L.,Maguire, K.C., Mersey, B. and Ferrer, E. A. (2011) Has the Earth’ssixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature, 471, 51–57.

Barrett, C. B., Travis, A. J. and Dasgupta, P. (2011) On biodiversity conser-vation and poverty traps. Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences, 108, 13907–13912.

Cardinale, B. J., Duffy, J. E., Gonzalez, A., Hooper, D. U., Perrings, C.,Venail, P., Narwani, A., Mace, G.M., Tilman, D., Wardle, D.A.,Kinzig, A. P., Daily, G. C., Loreau, M., Grace, J. B., Larigauderie, A.,Srivastava, D. S. andNaeem, S. (2012) Biodiversity loss and its impact onhumanity. Nature, 486, 59–67.

xxiv Foreword






Ehrlich, P. R. and Ehrlich, A.H. (1981) Extinction: The Causes andConsequences of the Disappearance of Species. Random House, NewYork.

(2008) The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.Island Press, Washington, DC.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and HumanWell-Being:Biodiversity Synthesis. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC.

Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, A. J. (2011) TheAnthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. PhilosophicalTransactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical andEngineering Sciences, 369, 842–867.

Vitousek, P.M., Ehrlich, P. R., Ehrlich, A.H. and Matson, P. (1986) Humanappropriation of the product of photosynthesis. Bioscience, 36,368–373.

Wilson, E.O. (1992) The Diversity of Life. Harvard University Press,Cambridge, MA.

Foreword xxv











Preface

This book marks the end of a journey that began twenty-two years agowhen I accepted an invitation from Karl-Göran Mäler, the newlyappointed Director of the re-formed Beijer Institute at the RoyalSwedish Academy of Sciences, to lead an interdisciplinary researchprogram on biodiversity. That program brought together aroundforty social and natural scientists, and charged them with exploringthe anthropogenic dimensions of biodiversity change. The results weresummarized in three volumes (Barbier, Burgess and Folke 1994;Perrings et al. 1994, 1995).

They were heady times. The 1992 UN Conference on Environmentand Development (UNCED) had concluded with a declaration of theintention of the governments represented there to achieve “a new andequitable global partnership through the creation of new levels of coop-eration among States, key sectors of societies and people . . .which respectthe interests of all and protect the integrity of the global environmentaland developmental system.” The Conventions on Biodiversity, ClimateChange, and Desertification were opened for signature at the conference.

They were also momentous times. The principles that had guidedhuman attitudes to the resources of the common environment since thetime of Hugo Grotius1 were being unraveled. The Rio Declarationendorsed a set of principles that included the following:

States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and theprinciples of international law, the sovereign right to exploit their ownresources pursuant to their own environmental and developmental policies,and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction orcontrol do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areasbeyond the limits of national jurisdiction. (United Nations Conference onEnvironment and Development 1992)

1 Grotius enunciated the freedom of the high seas as a fundamental principle ofinternational law in 1608.

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That principle was embodied in the Convention on Biological Diversity(CBD), which was opened for signature at the conference.

When the first Global Biodiversity Assessment was initiated a yearlater, 1,500 scientists contributed to what we hoped would be the startof a constructive relationship with the international policy community.When the report of the Global Biodiversity Assessment was published in1995 (Heywood and Watson 1995) we discovered just how wrong wewere. To borrow the words of Dorothy Parker, the report was nottossed aside lightly by many governments of the day, it was thrownwith great force.

The next seventeen years saw repeated efforts to build a science–policy interface that would inform both national governments andmultilateral agreements. Whereas the Global Biodiversity Assessmenthad been sponsored by the UNEnvironment Programme (UNEP) alone,by the time the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was launchedin 2000 it had the backing of four UN agencies: the InternationalCouncil for Science, the Consultative Group on InternationalAgricultural Research (CGIAR), the World Bank, the WorldResources Institute (WRI), the World Business Council for SustainableDevelopment, and the World Conservation Union. Its reports(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005a, 2005b, 2005c), oftenreferred to in this book, were more favorably received than the reportsof the Global Biodiversity Assessment. However, the lack of directengagement of national governments still compromised its effectivenessas a vehicle for bringing international biodiversity science to the policycommunity.

In a similar attempt to enhance its relevance to the policy communitythe international biodiversity science program, DIVERSITAS, hadreformed itself at the turn of the century around an agenda that wasdirected to understanding the causes and human consequences of globalbiodiversity change. I joined the Science Committee of the program atthat moment (and later co-directed the ecoSERVICES core project withShahid Naeem). In 2005, the year the MA reported, DIVERSITAS wasasked to carry forward an initiative of Jacques Chirac, then President ofFrance, to test the international community’s interest in the establish-ment of a permanent science-policy body. For two years the initiative,under the name of International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise onBiodiversity, conducted consultative meetings around the world. Onceit had been demonstrated that there was at least some appetite for such a

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mechanism, the effort was adopted by UNEP and merged with a sepa-rate effort to follow up the MA and the consultative meetings gave wayto formal intergovernmental conferences to explore the establishmentof an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity andEcosystem Services (IPBES). In 2010, at the third such conference,governments agreed to recommend establishment of the body andbefore the end of that year – the International Year of Biodiversity –

the General Assembly of the UN had asked UNEP to initiate the body.In April 2012 IPBES was formally launched.

What has happened to the science in the meantime? The one cleartrend has been the rise of ecosystem services: a concept introduced tonatural scientists by Westman’s 1977 review of the implications of theway that economists approached the valuation of the benefits of eco-systems (Westman 1977). But the concept of ecosystem services hasbeen far from unifying, and has not affected all. Taxonomists andsystematists, for example, find little that they can use in the concept.Conservation biology had been developing as a subdiscipline since thelate 1970s with a focus on habitat loss, species extinctions, and geneticerosion. It connected ecology and population biology to conservationpractice and hence to the non-governmental organizations most directlyinvolved in the conservation effort. Despite the fact that some of theseorganizations had already embraced a conservation and developmentagenda, however, conservation biology typically focused only on wild-living species. During the 1990s conservation biologists began toinclude ecosystem services among the reasons advanced for conserva-tion, but the services considered were only those generated by wildspecies. Within ecology, the 1990s saw the development of a field ofinquiry focused on the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystemfunctioning that has laid the foundations for a systematic analysis of thelinkages between biodiversity and ecosystem services, but this too haslargely focused on experimental manipulation of natural systems(Cardinale et al. 2012).

The science of managed systems has been just as resistant to change.Before the 1990s, biodiversity in agro-ecosystems largely meant cropgenetic diversity and the diversity of pests and pathogens. Since thattime there has been growing interest in agro-biodiversity sensu largo.DIVERSITAS added a crosscutting network on agro-biodiversity in theearly years of this century. Yet interactions between agronomists, pestmanagement scientists, and ecologists have beenminimal. The same can

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be said of human, animal, and plant health science. The science has beencaught in stubborn silos.

Within economics, the discipline that spurred interest in ecosystemservices in the first place, the 1990s saw the establishment of the field ofecological economics. This was an attempt to create a science of theinteractions between human production and exchange and the pro-cesses of the biophysical environment. It required collaborationbetween economists and ecologists (at a minimum) and sought tobuild new ways of understanding the dynamics of coupled systems.Indeed, the Beijer biodiversity program was an early foray into thefield. The reformed Beijer International Institute of EcologicalEconomics, the International Society for Ecological Economics, andthe biodiversity program were all launched in the same year. Muchhas been achieved. The work of Gretchen Daily and colleagues in theNatural Capital Project is one of the better-known examples, but thereare many others. The existence of the field has itself been an irritant tomany economists working on problems of the environment preciselybecause it encourages work across traditional disciplinary boundaries,but it has also changed the way that natural resource economics is done.

Nevertheless, if one has to askwhether the science is ready to contributepolicy-relevant knowledge to the new IPBES, the answer has to be “no.”The scientists working within particular disciplines and sub-disciplinesmay well be ready to contribute data and analysis from their own fields.However, our capacity to put the information together in meaningfulways, to undertake meta-analyses across fields, to model the feedbacksbetween social and biophysical systems well enough to be able to makeconditional projections of the consequences of particular policy options, isextremely limited. Biodiversity science may be more challenging thanother areas of science in this respect, simply because it covers so manydimensions of both social and biophysical systems. But the fact is that westill have extreme difficulty in working across disciplines. Nor dowe havethe models of coupled systems needed to undertake the kind of policyexperiments called for by the new body.

The problems posed by global biodiversity change demand that wedo better. The two decades since the first Rio conference have seen adecline in almost every indicator we have for the diversity of wild-livingspecies. The MA reported that we are currently experiencing extinctionrates up to a thousand times the background rate. We now know thatthese rates are still increasing. There are, however, other similarly

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Documents

Our Uncommon Heritage€¦ · 1.1 Biodiversity 1 1.2 The Holocene extinction 8 1.3 The challenge for biodiversity science 12 1.4 Science and policy at the crossroads 19 1.5 The challenge