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Part I
Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services and PovertyāThe Potential for Synergies
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Chapter 2
The Potential, Realised and Essential Ecosystem Service Benefits of Biodiversity Conservation
Will R. Turner1, Katrina Brandon2, Thomas M. Brooks3,4,5, Claude Gascon6, Holly K. Gibbs7, Keith Lawrence1, Russell A. Mittermeier1 and Elizabeth R. Selig1
1Conservation International, Arlington, VA, USA
2Independent Consultant, Beijing, China
3NatureServe, Arlington, VA, USA
4World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), University of the Philippines, Los BaƱos, the Philippines
5School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania, Tasmania, Australia
6National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Washington, DC, USA
7Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Introduction
There are substantial debates regarding the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, even though the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other international agreements explicitly connect biodiversity conservation to poverty alleviation (Sachs et al., 2009). As noted in Chapter 1, for example, countries agreed that significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national levels by 2010 was āa contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earthā (CBD, n.d.-a), and included this as part of Millennium Development Goal 7 (MDG7, Ensure Environmental Sustainability). In 2010, this agreement was extended to ātake effective and urgent action to halt the loss of biodiversity in order to ensure that by 2020 ecosystems are resilient and continue to provide essential services, thereby securing the planet's variety of life, and contributing to human well-being, and poverty eradicationā (CBD, n.d.-b). This goal is assessed by country-level indicators on species extinction risk, remaining forest cover and the percentage of lands and seas in protected areas, among others. While conservationists have long held that actions to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services support human well-being (e.g. Curry-Lindahl, 1972), until recently there has been little empirical, broad-scale evidence to support this. Conservation continues to be presented as both a constraint on development and a tool for achieving poverty reduction (Adams et al., 2004; West et al., 2006; Andam et al., 2010; Barrett et al., 2011).
As evidenced in this volume, debates continue over the relationships between biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction. However, there is strong evidence emerging that biodiverse systems show greater productivity and resilience (Flombaum & Sala, 2008; Isbell et al., 2011), with links between conservation and resilience of human communities likely to become even more important given projected climate change impacts (Turner et al., 2009). The links between biodiversity and human well-being can be expressed under the framework of ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), 2005). Yet the variety and values of these services remain greatly overlooked, by both beneficiaries and decision makers at virtually all scales, from local to global (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, 2009).
Discussions of biodiversity conservation actions (what, where and how) and poverty have largely been reviewed at national or local scales, and, indeed, biodiversity and poverty often coincide (Fisher & Christopher, 2007). There is also a general expectation that conservation actions, such as creating protected areas, should benefit human well-being, help secure livelihoods and pose little risk to, if not directly benefit, the poor (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Yet analyses to date have been insufficient to inform decision makers on the potential role of conservation for socio-economic development, especially regarding the linkages that conservation action has to poverty alleviation (Chapter 9, this volume).
Here, we undertake a global analysis by mapping ecosystem service flows from natural habitats to human communities in order to assess the distribution of services among countries and regions, to investigate the flow of these services to the poor in particular and to understand the connection between biodiversity conservation and these important services.
Approach and Methods
Previous studies of ecosystem services, human well-being and/or biodiversity have conducted analyses across large, heterogeneous spatial units, such as biodiversity priority regions (Turner et al., 2007; Naidoo et al., 2008), drainage basins (Luck et al., 2009), countries (Ebeling & YasuƩ, 2008) or the entire globe (Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010; Duraiappah, 2011). One of the inherent challenges of this type of analysis is to assess the ecosystem services in a way that allows for accurate comparison among different sites. We resolve methodological problems1 faced by previous studies by conducting all analyses on a grid of terrestrial equal-area hexagons2 (Sahr et al., 2003) and aggregate to larger units only for reporting.
We assess the flows of ecosystem services provided to people, especially to the poor, by priority habitats for terrestrial conservation, considering global distributions of biodiversity, physical factors and socio-economic context. Specific studies of a given area using local data may allow for a more in-depth understanding of that place; however, our data set offers the means to compare different places. The data for biodiversity (International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 2008), human population (LandScan, 2006) and poverty (Center for International Earth Science Information Network, 2005), as well as the base data for improving estimates for valuing climate regulation (Reusch & Gibbs, 2008) and other ecosystem services (Costanza et al., 1997; Turner et al., 2007), have been detailed elsewhere (Turner et al., 2012).
We use four geographically explicit valuation alternatives to estimate ecosystem service value (ESV) delivered to different socio-economic contexts and to understand links between biodiversity conservation and the sources of these services:
1. Potential services generated by natural habitats, irrespective of whether people are close enough to receive benefits;
2. Realised services, which account for the human population that might capture the services;
3. Essential services, the services that flow directly to the poor and provide immediate benefits;
4. Essential services with transfers, essential services as in #3, plus amounts the poor could receive from payments for ecosystem services (PES) mechanisms.
In the analysis in this chapter, we use these methods to understand the value of ecosystem services delivered by conservation priority areas,3 and how these values change when we incorporate human population and poverty into the calculation of ESV. We also explore the importance of ESV to the world's poor and geographic differences by region.
We explore 17 different classes of ecosystem services based on biome- and service-specific value estimates (Costanza et al., 1997) refined by more recent studies using improved land cover and climate regulation data (Sutton & Costanza, 2002; Turner et al., 2007, 2012). This approach does not account for within-biome variation; this and other known assumptions are only partially addressed by the refinements discussed in this chapter. Nevertheless, this approach is the only published, global mapping of values for a range of services and biomes, and has been used as a source for ESV estimates at regional (Viglizzo & Frank, 2006) and global scales (Balmford & Bond, 2005; Turner et al., 2007). We report all monetary values in 2005 US dollars, converted where necessary according to published estimates of annual global consumer price inflation. Our study includes only terrestrial areas, but this does include high-value coastal services and areas. More comprehensive valuation of marine ecosystem services in relationship to biodiversity conservation and human well-being remains a critical research need.
Given our interest in the relationship with poverty, we present our findings comparing the world's regions as defined by the World Bank's Country and Lending Groups (World Bank, 2012). We grouped 70 high-income countries, and used the standard regional groupings for all developing countries: East Asia and Pacific (EAP) (24), developing Europe and Central Asia (23), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) (30), Middle East and North Africa (MNA) (13), South Asia (8) and Sub-Saharan Africa (47). All countries in these latter categories are considered to be developing, although many are middle-income developing countries.
Potential Ecosystem Service Value: Economic Values Irrespective of Use
If all things were equal, the proportion of areas with high biodiversity and the total potential ESV for each region would be similar to its total proportion of land area. However, both biodiversity and ecosystem service value are distributed unequally over the globe. Figure 2.1a shows the variation in land area per region, and Figure 2.1b the biodiversity importance. Figure 2.1c then provides an overview of the proportion, by development status and region, of potential ESV in comparison to these variables.
The developing countries of Europe and Central Asia occupy a large land area (18% of the globe) and have potential ESV roughly proportionate to land area, but harbour only 1% of the total area of high biodiversity value. The high biodiversity and extensive tropical forests and watersheds in Latin America are reflected by the comparatively larger share of biodiversity and ESV reflected for that regionāboth around twice as high as expected on the basis of land area. The largely arid MNA region has lower concentrations of biodiversity relative to the area, and even less potential ESV, due in part to the near absence of forest ecosystem services in particular. The potential ESV and biodiversity conservation priority of Africa is roughly proportional to its land area, while EAP countries have ESV slightly higher than land area but twice the expected level of biodiversity importance. Developed nations have ESV roughly proportional to land area but with proportionately less high-biodiversity land area. These findings allow potential ESV to be mapped and hence the relative total potential ESV for different regions to be compared. Critically, however, they say little about the importance of services to people. Our analysis in the āRealised servicesā section of this chapter explores this.
Realised Services: Valuing Ecosystem Services by Considering Their Use
People, especially decision makers, assign higher value to ecosystem services that are directl...
