Measuring and Market Ecosystem Services, Functions, and Values in Oregon
1. Measuring and Marketing Ecosystem
Services, Functions, and Values in Oregon
Eric Nost
Department of Geography
Political Ecology Working Group
University of Kentucky
eric.nost@uky.edu
@ericnost
6. “We value what we
price, but nature's services
are, mostly, not traded in
any markets and not
priced....We cannot manage
what we do not measure
and we are not measuring
either the value of nature's
benefits or the costs of their
loss.”
-Pavan Sukhdev (2010)
7. “We value what we price,
but nature's services are,
mostly, not traded in any
markets and not
priced....We cannot
manage what we do not
measure and we are not
measuring either the value
of nature's benefits or the
costs of their loss.”
-Pavan Sukhdev (2010)
8. Value: “The importance or worth of a
wetland function to societal needs. This
includes public attitudes and the wetland’s
opportunity to provide a given function
based on its location.”
-OR Dept. of State Lands, 2012
9. Value: “The importance or worth of a
wetland function to societal needs. This
includes public attitudes and the wetland’s
opportunity to provide a given function
based on its location.”
-OR Dept. of State Lands, 2012
23. “And we now have because of GIS
tools and various resource censusing
tools that we have, we can look at all
these overlays and determine where
all these priorities are.”
OR regulator, 7-6-12
30. 3 moments of value’s measure
Assessment [Mapping priorities] is nice to tell
local regulators this is the mouth of
some important water, you know.
Regulatory Or for people who are looking into
starting new banks that don’t have
a lot of background…
OR consultant, 7-30-12
Market
32. Also, keep paying attention to change over
time, within specific historical-
geographcial contexts to see the
moments where neoliberal conservation
confronts its own contradictions.
34. Acknowledgments
NSF Award BCS-12138277 (PIs: Martin
Doyle, Rebecca Lave, Morgan Robertson), University
of Kentucky (UK) Barnhardt-Withington Award
UK graduate students, Eric Carter, Anna Secor, Matt
Wilson
Contact
eric.nost@uky.edu
@ericnost
Notes de l'éditeur
Today I want to tell you about the social relations and spatial logics motivating environmental regulators, conservationists, and eco-entrepreneurs in Oregon plan as they choose, and evaluate where in the landscape to do wetland and stream restoration for a cap and trade-type market. I’ll show how the state’s and conservationists’ efforts to map what priority locations for restoration and to point out these places to entrepreneurs are market-constraining, but perhaps only in the short-term. The takeaway here is that many of the new or revamped markets in ecosystem services we are seeing may not be about as commodification and commercialization so much as other, state-strengthening goals.
Let’s start here. Welcome to the Half Mile Lane site in exurban Portland, Oregon. It provides a number of ECS.
The wetland you see stores and delays water, which mitigates flood impacts for downstream homes.
The stream provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range.
A couple of years ago, state environmental agencies and conservationists undertook ecological restoration on the site, turning old farmland and a straightened ditch into a productive wetland and stream. This work was done for a market where developers purchase offsets for impacts to wetlands and streams. HML is also a demonstration project for what regulators and conservationists see as stronger metrics for the market, both of what counts as successful restoration, as well as what locations in the watershed are worthwhile to do restoration projects.
As TEEB leader PavanSukhdev explains to us, these markets are supposed to be about valuing nature.
For him – and we hear this quote a lot - “we cannot manage what we do not measure,” which means measuring the nature’s benefits and doing so as a $ price. As many have argued, this commodifies nature.
But lestyou think the focus on “value” is the domain solely ofpundits like Sukhdev, consider what how the Oregon DSL – one of the environmental agencies – defines it. For DSL, it means the opportunity to provide an ecological function.
Importantly, this opportunity is location-based; it’s spatial.
HML has the opportunity to mitigate flood impacts, because it is upstream of homes
and downstream of logging and mining operations that increase runoff.
So the question is: how do Oregon’s market actors measure the value of ecosystem services? Put more concretely - where in the landscape do they plan andchoose to do restoration for the market and why? Sukhdev makes the challenge of resource protection sounds so easy when he says that all that needs to be done to prevent environmental degradation is to “put a value on” nature. But the task of valuation has not been so effortless in Oregon.In the rest of this talk I want to walk you through the assessment of restoration sites in Oregon’s market, and how they become valued as places to do restoration. There are three moments to this, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against the interests of entrepreneurs. I want to demonstrate an at least short-term strength of state agencies contra entrepreneurs in constraining a kind of accumulation by restoration. New ventures in market governance may not deepen ecosystem commodification and commercialization as much as they throw up roadblocks. While these may only be short-term constraints, we should pay attention to them as potential moments where the market collapses under its own contradictions.
I first want to take a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how these markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, state and federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, in conjunction with state agencies like DSL - allow developers to make up for resource degradation by compensating entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. A good example: On January 25, 2012, the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) authorized the trade of four salmon habitat credits to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD).
DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself, where it had restored salmon habitat. Instead, it dealt THPRD credits. These credits are a measure of both the quality and quantity of habitat created after DSL replaced a culvert and performed other stream and wetland restoration work at HML.
THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell environmental regulators like DSL that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed. Note that in this case a state agency, DSL, was the one selling credits, but more often it is a private entrepreneur.
But either way, the idea is to ensure some kind/degree of ecological equivalence, and this is the art and science of assessment.
These kinds of trade demand an assessment of the value of the ecosystem services in question.
First, in the assessment moment, ecologically-trained consultants to restoration bankers work in the office with several online mapping to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration.
Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site. It’s bringing a lot of data from beyond the boundaries of the site together, and showing it to the user in one frame. Consultants have to answer questions about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the value score of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.
Agency staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment in the regulatory moment when they approve or deny an entrepreneur’s choice of where to do restoration that they outline in what’s called a bank instrument, or prospectus.
For instance, regulators often focus on reed canary grass, an invasive species that can spread rapidly on a restoration site from without and foil a project. They question whether a site and its landscape surroundings will, in the end, prove valuable if there is too much RCG around. Environmental agencies can in this moment modify a banker’s proposal to work on a certain piece of ground that is particularly susceptible to weeds by asking them to put more money into a long-term management.
Finally, there is a market moment to value’s measure. What non-profit conservationists want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, to get their credits to sell, the amount they get depends in large part on the location of their project.
These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC.
The idea is that bankers would get the full amount if they were doing restoration in a priority area and less if they were not. The problem is that if a banker had to do work in a priority area lest they not get as many credits as they expected, they’d be incentivized to work on land they wouldn’t necessarily normally restore. All else equal, they want to work on sites where they can get the most credit bang for their restoration buck. But having to work in priority areas could mean they have to work on sites with higher land prices, which would cut into their profits.To be clear: this isn’t how the market currently works, but regulators are using GIS to see whether bankers are siting in priority areas and conservationists are pushing for this trading ratio protocol to be adopted. It is still part of the discussion on the ground in Oregon, about what should/might happen.
In general, then, through all three moments, how state agencies in Oregon - with help from the conservationists who have helped map priority areas and author market protocols - how they assess ecosystem service value in site selection proves constraining entrepreneurs.
Assessment – the landscape context they have to look at weighs bankers down
Regulatory – bankers have to put more capital into long-term management
Market – they will not get full credit, have to work in different places
Bankers are rather unhappy about this valorization of restoration – and question regulators’ authority to do it. It’s come to the point where bankers may take state agencies to court on the issue and stop doing more restoration for the market. And so what we see is not the state rolling out the conditions for market success, but genuine market constraints.
I do want to caution that this only holds for the current political moment. In the long-term, what we might see is bankers getting used to regulators’ expectations about where it is valuable to do restoration. Indeed, the way state agencies have mapped out priorities might only serve as aids to new bankers, making it easier for bankers to find sites. This would facilitate the commodification and commercialization of restoration and provide more opportunities for developers to just buy credits for their resource impacts.
And so to wrap up, what I think this case does for us is two-fold. First, it reminds us to pay attention to the spatial logics of these markets, asking what sort of notions of spatial efficiency and prioritization constitute these markets?
It also suggests a need to keep paying attention to change over time, within specific historical-geographcial contexts to see the moments where neoliberal conservation confronts its own contradictions.
In the short-term, we might see moves by the state and conservationists to implement new measures of restoration success not as a deepening of commodification and commercialization, but as having the effect of slowing the market.In the long-run, it might only enhance capitalist investment in restoration in particular places, facilitating the market, in what several scholars have named as the variegation of neoliberal natures or neoliberal conservation.Either way, demarcating the difference between the two can tell us a lot how about market-oriented conservation projects succeed and fail, and to what effect.
