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By Rebecca Goldman
As the global population grows and demand for resources increases, the future of conservation will rest on how humans interact with their environment.
A new trend in conservation is to view this relationship between nature and people from the perspective of ecosystem services — the benefits nature provides humans such as through purifying water, sequestering carbon, fertilizing soil, diminishing flood peaks and more.
The concept of ecosystem services is spreading throughout research, academia and applied approaches to conservation. With this approach comes noted success — such as building new constituencies for conservation, engaging new stakeholders and expanding funding sources.
But to fully capitalize on these successes and to make these new coalitions real, we need to ensure delivery of our promises — to make sure we are providing cleaner water, enhancing soil fertility, aiding in the long term sequestration of carbon and protecting biodiversity.
If we do not start to measure strategy effectiveness and monitor our conservation outcomes, we all could lose.
The Next Step: Delivering on Promises
Adding ecosystem services to our conservation approach only further emphasizes the need to measure outcomes. We cannot keep promising human well-being benefits without ensuring that we are providing them.
Calculations of "bucks and acres" are no longer enough. Delivering on our promises is more than just determining priorities, creating strategies and implementing conservation plans. It is about closing the loop and measuring our accomplishments: Are we really enhancing biodiversity? Is water cleaner than it was before our intervention?
Right now, The Nature Conservancy is finalizing a business plan that provides a methodology for testing our effectiveness. It's not a question of monitoring every outcome for every project, but we need to test some basic rules of thumb — such as whether forest certification ensures greater biodiversity, or whether riparian buffers purify agricultural runoff.
We need to be held accountable for our actions. Without demonstrating the returns on our conservation investments, over time we will lose the confidence of those who made these investments.
There are plenty of obstacles to measuring these returns conclusively — such as how we measure and monitor biodiversity improvements efficiently and effectively with limited budgets.
But we have to start somewhere.
The Nature Conservancy is using a series of pilot projects that are in various states of implementing measures and monitoring programs — such as our Indonesia REDD project, Primeiras and Segunadas Archipelago marine protected areas project in Mozambique and the Penobscot River dam project in Maine.
In all cases, The Nature Conservancy is developing tools and methods to track effectiveness through time and is committed to scaling up these tools and methods. It's a great start to a big challenge.
(March 2009)
Fast-Forward to the Future of Conservation!
- A Dow Jones Average for the Environment
- Get Kids Back to Nature
- Conservationists — Can We Talk?
- A New Market for Shellfish
- The Turbine Beneath Our Feet
- Taking a Census of Nature
- Get Urbanites Interested in Conservation
- Sea Change for Ocean Management
- Bringing Business to the Parks
- Small Island Nations: Green Leaders?
- Truly Sustainable Hydropower
- Measuring Conservation Success
Photo credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Entering data at Ellsworth Creek, Washington (Harley Soltes); courtesy of Rebecca Goldman
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