Solutions to Environmental Threats – Biodiversity Loss

Gretchen C. Daily, professor of environmental science, Stanford University.

It is time to confront the hard with that traditional approaches to conversion, takes alone, are doomed to fail. Nature reserves are too small, too few, too isolated and too subject to change to support more than a tiny fraction of Earth’s biodiversity. The challenge is to make conversion attractive – from economic and cultural perspectives. We cannot go on treating nature like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

We depend on nature for food security, clean water, climate stability, seafood, timber, and other biological and physical services. To maintain these benefits, we need not just remote reserves but places everywhere – more like “ecosystem service stations”.

A few pioneers are integrating conservation and human development. The Costa Rican government is paying landowners for ecosystem services from tropical forests, including carbon offsets, hydropower construction, biodiversity conservation and scenic beauty. China is investing $ 100 billion in “ecocompensation”, including innovative policy and finance mechanisms that reward conservation and restoration. The country is also creating “ecosystem function conservation areas” that make up 18 percent of its land area. Colombia and South Africa have made dramatic policy changes, too.

Three advantages would help the rest of the world scale such models of success. One: new science and tools to value and account for natural capital, in biophysical, economic and other terms. For example, the Natural Capital Project has developed inVEST software that integrates valuation of ecosystem services with trade-offs, which governments and corporations can use in planning land and resource use and infrastructure development. Two: compelling demonstrations of such tools in resource policy. Three: cooperation among governments, development organisations and communities to help nations build more durable economies which also maintaining critical ecosystems services.