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ALERT - December 4, 2006: Protect Our Woods joins allies to submit a response to the Draft Supplement to the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the German Ridge Restoration Project in Hoosier National Forest30a. No Satisfactory Analysis of Ecosystem Services (Part 1 of 2)Neither the German Ridge FEIS/DSFEIS, nor the HNF Plan and FEIS include consideration of ecosystem services and the effects that logging may have on them.During the comment period for the DEIS of the HNF LRMP, we submitted the following comment under “23. Ecosystem Services” “Throughout this document we have tried to make it clear that the Hoosier National Forest plays an integral role in providing ecosystem services, such as water purification and filtration, carbon sequestration, soil productivity and other services. Indeed, water was one of the main concerns that prompted the protection of lands that later became the Hoosier National Forest. Many researchers around the world, including the Forest Service and other government employees have attempted to place a value on these services. The literature is full of studies such as damage cost avoided, replacement cost, and substitute cost methods that attempt to value ecosystem services. One of the best sources of information that we have found is online at www.ecosystemvaluation.org. " The Plan and DEIS have essentially ignored placing any value on these services and how commercial logging will affect their efficiency. Forest Service “Response to Comment” Regarding Ecosystem Services:NONE GreenFire Comment on Lack of “Response to Comments” Regarding Ecosystem Services:Ecosystem Services is not a new concept. According to Columbia University’s Geoffrey Heal, at a Keynote Address on the “Economics of Ecosystem Services,” in 2004, (attended by an unnamed Forest Service employee as seen in the question and answer transcription), the concept of ecosystem valuation dates back to Hicks in the 1930’s.Returning to the issue of ecosystem services, Dr. Heal commented that ecosystem services are frequently public goods (such as those he had mentioned previously: climate stabilization, pollination, etc.). Furthermore, he stated that “a great majority of them are non-market goods, so when it comes to valuing them, this raises some questions, but questions that are fairly conventional in the field of environmental economics —questions which are, in fact, the lifeblood of environmental economics.” He pointed out one aspect of ecosystem services which is “certainly rather distinctive, and that’s that there is frequently a considerable amount of uncertainty about the functional relationship between the state of an ecosystem and the services that it provides.” Switching to a discussion of “the National Academy of Sciences report (the National Research Council report) and how it addresses some of these things, Dr. Heal said that the report starts off by “classifying the various ways in which ecosystems and ecosystem services can have value.” He described this as a “conventional classification into use and non-use values, with a sub-classification of the use values into direct and indirect values” and added that “there’s a two-way classification which is central to the report. One is a classification of the types of values that ecosystem services can have. The second, obviously, is a classification of how you can go about valuing them.” Emphasizing that this is all fairly standard economics, he identified the optional ways to value them: “with revealed-preference techniques, with stated-preference techniques, or with some combination of the two.” He added that in writing the report, he and the others spent some time “trying to work out when one or the other is more appropriate and which of the various techniques is more appropriate for which particular types of services.” He also stated that “the discussion of these issues in the report does address some of the issues raised by the NOAA Blue Ribbon Commission on Contingent Valuation and some of the critics of the CV approaches there. I don’t think we have anything enormously original to say about that, but I think there’s quite a clear integration of the literature on that within that section of the report.” Dr. Heal identified one of the key questions that they focused on in the report is “how the services provided by an ecosystem (i.e., the services provided by natural capital) change as the ecosystems are impacted by human activity.” He presented the example of how the extent of mangrove swamps and other types of coastal wetlands affect the productivity of offshore fisheries and identified the pertinent questions as: “What exactly of coastal wetlands affect fisheries and on what sort of timescale?” As another example, he brought up an issue that he has been involved with: New York City’s decision to conserve the Catskills watershed. The primary question they have dealt with here is: “How does the extent of a watershed and the nature of the vegetation in that watershed affect the watershed’s ability to provide ecosystem services?” He identified the two “critical ecosystem services” that most watersheds provide as water purification and stabilization of stream flow and said, “If you’re thinking about the conservation of a threatened watershed because of the value of those services, then it’s actually quite important to have some understanding [of] how different ways of using that watershed and different levels of human impact on that watershed will affect the provision of those services.” Ideally, he said, you’re looking for some kind of functional relationship between the state of the watershed and the services it provides. Dr. Heal went on to say that “we don’t have to answer that type of question if all we want to do is to value the current services of ecosystems, but if we want to value changes in the services that result from extended human activity or from policy intervention, then we do have to answer these sorts of questions about what’s the nature of the link from the physical characteristics of an ecosystem and the extent of the ecosystem and the human intervention in the ecosystem through to the services that it provides.” For emphasis, he repeated, “If we want to value the change in natural capital which comes from the destruction or the conservation of a system like a watershed or a wetland, then we have to be able to answer those kinds of questions.” He went on to state that “the biggest challenge that we face here is linking changes in the bio-geo-chemical state of an ecosystem to a change in the service flow,” and he said that the NAS report pushes quite hard for more of the integrated economic and ecological modeling that is required to address this. On April 21st, 2005 The Economist Magazine published a report called, “Are you being served? Environmental entries are starting to appear on the balance sheet. Perhaps soon, the best things in life will not be free.” In this article the author is talking about the deforestation happening around the Panama Canal, and efforts to reforest. He notes that: “A deforested, grass-covered watershed would release far more water in total than a forested one, he admits, but that water would arrive in useless surges rather than as a useful steady stream. A forested watershed makes a lot more sense.” He goes on to say: “Another problem caused by deforestation is that it allows more sediment and nutrients to flow into the canal. Sediment clogs the channel directly. Nutrients do so indirectly, by stimulating the growth of waterweeds. Both phenomena require regular, and expensive, dredging. More trees would ameliorate these difficulties, trapping sediments and nutrients as well as regulating the supply of fresh water. Planting forests around the Panama Canal would thus have the same effect as building vast reservoirs and filtration beds.” “Viewed this way, any scheme to reforest the canal's watershed is, in fact, an investment in infrastructure.” The report goes on to say that World Bank projects in countries such as Croatia are using NPV, IRR, and cost-benefit calculations to prioritize reforestation projects on the coast, using the categories landscape, hunting, wood production, and erosion protection. Consistently, the benefits of “landscape” outweighs all other categories and makes reforestation project benefits outweigh the costs. Columbia University? The World Bank? The Economist? These are hardly “treehuggers,” but are in fact “conservative” universities, think tanks and magazines that are admired by many. Click here for Part 30b. No Satisfactory Analysis of Ecosystem Services Part 2 of 2Protect Our Woods
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