[MUSIC] So perhaps we'll start paradoxically by talking about one of the best studies that was done using the ecosystem service method. This was a study done in 2011. Where the United Kingdom conducted a nationwide ecosystem assessment. In my view, it was really a beautiful piece of work. It's all freely available online, in the links below. And they did everything right according to theory. Including the development of scenarios, where they projected the different services into the future. And they were able to illustrate how, by pursuing a strictly economic provisioning services, one generated less overall well-being than alternative world views or economic developments that put a greater emphasis on preserving and conserving all ecosystem services. Interestingly, 3 years later there was what they called a follow-on survey, where they basically took stock of the progress that had been made since the initial study. And at least when I read it, between the lines, I was able to infer that not much had changed, neither in terms of policy, nor in terms of real changes on the ground. So why is that? Maybe this is one way in which one can start talking about the different shortcomings of the method. And I'll quickly say that these are my leading hypotheses, they're not mutually exclusive, and other experts or you yourself may have different opinions. So I would start by a hypothesis, of basically, called inertia. Namely, maybe the method is great and it will be implemented eventually, but because our different sociopolitical institutions have a lot of inertia built into them, it just takes time for those results to come through. Perhaps in 15 years we'll have a lot of these ideas that are turning into practical changes. A second one is there may be resistance to implementing some of these ideas because there's a lack of legitimacy in those who produced the study. Indeed, often in the past, these were done by small groups of scientists. And we know today that if one wants to have a greater acceptance of the ideas that even the instigation of the project, let alone the development of the scenarios and the calculations and the different recommendations, should be done collectively in what's called co-production and a co-learning scenario. Thirdly, the approach does aim at improving sustainability and ethics for future generations, and therefore the work paradigm is also based on cooperation and constructive sharing of information. We know that this doesn't necessarily match the reality where you can have special interest groups who are defending their turf, but you can also have phenomenon such as corruption that try and bypass any decision even it aims at helping the greater good. So currently the ecosystem services assessment doesn't have any real mechanism for countering some of these entrenched positions. Fourthly, there's sometimes is a mismatch and scale between where services are produced and where the beneficiaries, or the consumers of those services reside. To use one common example that you'll see in any study, as soon as one talks about trees or forests there usually is a line that tries to describe, quantify, and perhaps even monetize the value of the carbon that's sequestrated and therefore that doesn't accentuate future climate change. The people who are in charge of planting, maintaining those trees are a subset of the global citizens and of course as a political decider, I may not wish to spend the extra resources on an action that's going to help the global good. It must somehow convince that everyone's going to do this at the same time together. So finally, is perhaps the method is still, even though it's presented as fairly straightforward, it's reliant on a scientific knowledge that is still too complicated. We're going to talk later about the difficulty in implementing and mainstreaming these ideas, but even on the scientific side, everyone can understand intuitively that there's a link between biodiversity and that's the foundation for all the different services that ultimately feed into our well-being. But the exact functional links are still sometimes so tenuous that it can be difficult to convince somebody, whether it's a politician or another fellow citizen that it's worthwhile protecting this butterfly or this cohort of plants. In addition to sort of the mechanistic complexity, we have as soon as you enter into the worlds of evaluation and monetization, huge uncertainties that are based on some decisions that have to be made. How much is biodiversity worth intrinsically? Values can go from $0 for some people to an infinite amount for others. How much is a ton of carbon that's been sequestrated worth? Again, commonly used values can go from $20 per metric ton per year to $200 per year, and this will have an enormous impact on your evaluation phase of a project. Which, given that they're based on uncertainties that have no clear answer, people may say, well how does this help us in the end, given that the uncertainties around each scenario become so large? So clearly there still are a lot of things that still need to be worked out in this ecosystem service assessment. And we've provided you with a few non-exclusive hypotheses of things that are either shortcomings or that could be improved. We'd be curious if you have other ideas of shortcomings, so please join the forums and share succinctly what you think is a shortcoming of the system. In the next sequence, we're going to talk about the ecosystem service assessment in a broader context. What is the length between this approach and biodiversity protection and sustainable development? [MUSIC]
