Government and private experts deliberated how to create a market for the natural processes performed by the ecosystem in a forum at the School of Law Friday.
The Next Generation Conservation Symposium was an opportunity for environmental and legal experts to discuss with government officials emerging trends in the management of natural resources. The forum was presented by the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets.
“We are entering a new paradigm, analogous to the industrial revolution,” said Richard Swenson, director of the Animal Husbandry and Clean Water Division of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. “We are entering a new energy paradigm, a new global concern about the quality of our environment.”
The concept of creating a market for natural resources evolved out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a $24 million research project launched by the United Nations in 2001 to assess the state of the planet.
The symposium addressed the government’s role in the preservation of the environment, such as the creation of an ecosystem services market.
Ecosystem services is a name for the services rendered by the environment. It includes the obvious, such as fossil fuels and land for infrastructure, and also the subtle, such as the pollination of crops and the breakdown of animal wastes, said Adam Davis, president of Solano Partners, a consulting firm that specializes in conservation.
The main obstacle to a regulated market is the inability to place a monetary value on ecosystem services, said Lydia Olander, senior associate director for ecosystem services at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
“We cannot manage what we cannot measure, and if we do not have a coherent way of measuring these impacts across... specific ecosystems and specific services, then we will fail to manage them appropriately,” Olander said.
The problem is that scientific and statistical inquires to define a quantitative value for clean air and other ecosystem services have not been done, Davis said.
He noted that determining these values would allow private property owners to earn profits not only by harvesting resources to the detriment of the environment, but also by protecting and properly stewarding the land.
“I think that ecosystem services are really about the creation of new forms of wealth, new forms of property rights created by policy,” Davis said.
He added that the creation of an ecosystem services market is similar to early efforts to define property rights.
“In 1775 began 100 years of policy making, where over 500 laws were passed by the U.S. Congress that completely reformed the property system and created clear title to land,” Davis said. “Now what were we doing? We were using scientific tools, measurement tools like surveying and appraisal, to turn an abstraction of owning land into tangible assets.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.