[MUSIC] You've been convinced that the ecosystem service method is useful for putting to light the contribution of natural capital towards our human well-being. But conducting an assessment takes time. It can be as little as a few hours or it can be several months. You're obviously going to ask yourself at some point, when are the best cases for using this type of approach? So in this sequence, we're going to ask, when is is the ecosystem approach most useful? And secondly, when is it most likely to succeed? Those are two slightly different questions, and it's important to take each of them in turn. So in my view, this approach works best when we're dealing with an important, strategic decision that deals with natural resources. I have seen the best examples when we're applying either a governmental decision, or even a private sector decision, about a specific project and we have to weigh the pros and the cons of that project. Indeed, the ecosystem service method allows one to be fairly transparent and objective about what the gains and the losses under each scenario might be. So typically, if you're going to build a dam, it's going to bring some benefits, electricity, to a certain amount of population. But another segment in the population is going to suffer some of the consequences. And this type of framework allows different actors to come together and weigh the pros and the cons in a common framework. It's interesting, because this approach can also be used by the private sector, even more of a risk analysis type approach, where they have to identify their potential dependency on the flow of certain ecosystem services. Or they have to realize how quickly they may be able to rebound after some catastrophic event. So the approach is most likely to actually be implemented, in theory at least, when it's conducted in a certain way. And we're going to get a little bit more into this in the next sequence. But it's when we have situations where our natural resource is clearly identified, a problem is clearly identified, all the people who are potentially affected by the decision are clearly identified. And the process is led in a iterative, collaborative way. That's the theory, at least. We'll see that in practice it can get a little bit more complicated than that. Let's take a very concrete and common example. Here we have a farmer who's using what's called conventional farming techniques. Namely, he is choosing to use herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers to boost the production of any given crop, any part of the world. This is a decision that is made based on an economic rationale that you get the most food for the least amount of investment, both in terms of time and money to produce that food. What's interesting in this common scenario is that there's a lot of externalities that are not incorporated into the equation. So what's an externality? An externality is any effect, positive or negative, that a third party suffers without having a say of either the price or the decision to implement a certain policy. So in this case, think of the farmer who's applying these herbicides and pesticides. One of the externalities in this equation is the production of greenhouse gas emissions, which currently can be released into the environment for free. Greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuels are used in high levels to produce a lot of the synthetic chemicals. Another externality is the human cost, especially in terms of human health. The workers that have to apply these chemicals may suffer increases of certain rates of illness and disease. Finally, you may have the nitrogen that's released into the environment and that flows downstream. There have been several examples throughout the world where downstream bays, due to nitrification, which comes from excess nitrogen released into the environment, has entire fisheries collapse of the regions that are exposed to the excess nitrogen. So, here's a group, for example, of stakeholders, where you have the downstream fishermen who are affected by upstream logical and legal decisions. So, how could the ecosystem service method be applied in this scenario and by whom? I would argue it could be used by a number of different players. First of all, the farmer himself or herself may ask, okay, I can either continue doing things the way I've always done them, or I can go along an organic certification route. What are the pros and the cons of each of those methods? Perhaps you have a local government who's in charge of the watershed. And who's getting complaints from the downstream residents about some of the negative consequences of nitrification. They may get the different parties together around a table and say, okay, we need jobs. We need income, we need to produce food. But is there perhaps a different compromise that we can strike, where you can still produce the food, but by diminishing some of the downstream costs? You might also take the perspective from a local NGO, that's a concern about the environmental issues. They may be concern about the effects on wildlife on in particular. And they may use the ecosystem service approach to highlight how we are eroding, basically the base, the natural resource that feeds all of our well-being over the long run, and seek ways to better protect it. Finally, the private sector might be interested in analyzing the situation through the ecosystem service method. So for example, imagine a large corporation or a multinational that's considering buying a stake in a downstream factory that produces or that processes fish. They may wish to understand how upstream activities could potentially threaten their revenue stream. So, what's interesting about this case is that the people who are negatively affected by the upstream decisions aren't necessarily around the table when decisions are made about how much herbicide, pesticides, fertilizers can be used. These types of decisions are usually taken on a fairly siloed way. And the immediate concerns are, is it safe in the immediate environment, are the workers going to be safe when they apply it? And yet, we see that, in reality, over a larger temporal and spacial scales, a lot of other factors and actors are ultimately going to be affected by these decisions. So we're starting to see how these are also complicated to implement, in terms of getting people around a table. Because the stakeholders, whether it's the future generations, the downstream farmers or other players, often aren't involved in the initial decision. So how does one conduct one of these ecosystem service assessments in practice? Well, it turns out that a bunch of different organizations have put together manuals, and we've put links to these for you in below the video. Most of them are freely available. All of them, however, follow a very similar sequence of events. All of them begin with the idea of scoping, namely, what is the problem? What are the current trends which, if they continue as-is, in a business-as-usual sequence, what will happen? The second important step is scenario building. Basically, and this probably isn't done enough in practice, where people stop and say, okay, what are the different decisions that we have in front of us? We can go down pathway A, or pathway B, or pathway C. And these are basically going to set the parameters to allow us to estimate the consequences of each of these different pathways. The third step is precisely that. It's modelling the consequences of each of these political decisions. For example, when the UK did their national ecosystem assessment, they contrasted different types of economies, from a very neoliberal, open market view to a more protectionist and isolationist view. Each of those had very different consequences on different types of ecosystem services, from provisioning, cultural, and regulatory services. But at least they were able to model them out into the future. The fourth decision is regarding which indicators to use to see if one is making progress. How will we know if we're moving in the right direction? Fifthly, how does one conduct the valuing? This is actually a very interesting and important step, where we decide how are we going to conduct arbitration. Inevitably, there's going to be trade-offs between these different scenarios. How do we decide what is acceptable to our society and what isn't? Are there, for example, some elements that are irreplaceable? Can other elements, if once lost, can be compensated or mitigated elsewhere? These are the types of decisions that will have to be taken ideally in a collective setting. Finally, there's the debate and decision-making phase. It's also important to understand that the ecosystem service approach is not some mathematical formula that spits out the perfect silver bullet answer. All it does, it puts down on paper, white on black, what the consequences of different types of political choices probably will be. Ultimately, it still remains a political decision where people have to barter and trade and find something that's acceptable to all parties. Ideally, this type of process is also done iteratively, which means that as new information is gained, or new information comes in, we revisit some of our assumptions. And it's also done in a participatory way, where ideas and scenarios are co-generated, so that learning is also done collectively. This all sounds, to me, extremely idealistic, and I almost want to start chanting kumbaya sometimes. But I think it's interesting to understand that the notions embedded within this approach match those of the ideals we're trying to reach, if we are trying to move society towards a more sustainable and ethical way of living. These type of approaches could at least not only help change our minds, but also make us make better decisions in practice. One of the take-home messages of this sequence is that, by using the ecosystem service approach, one will end up taking different decisions from those that are made currently. They'll be different, but they'll also be better in the sense that they'll probably lead to a more sustainable society, a more ethical society, where the differences between the haves and the have-nots are reduced. [MUSIC]
