The Nature Conservancy - From My Perspective: Peter Bryant

From My Perspective: Peter Bryant

Peter Bryant is the Deputy Director of the Great Rivers Partnership

Living in one of the driest parts of the United States, I am constantly reminded of the urgency for conserving freshwater species, habitats and ecosystems. In New Mexico, the Rio Grande is the lifeblood of the state, providing water for fast-growing cities like Albuquerque and for farmlands further south. This is true of all the Great Rivers of the world — including the Mississippi, the Yangtze and the Paraguay and Parana rivers in Brazil — which are the lifeline to millions of people, plants and animals that live in their watersheds and depend on the rivers for survival. I have always been interested in rivers. I grew up going to fishing derbies on the Merrimac River in New Hampshire. Later in graduate school I worked on restoring salmon runs to the Westfield River, a tributary of the Connecticut. I have seen rivers degraded to the point where salmon restoration is nearly impossible and where altered flows have destroyed habitat and restricted rafting. I have always believed that rivers provide real benefits to people — not just in the enjoyment one gets from recreation, or in the aesthetic pleasure of watching ripples of sun on the water — but real, economic benefits from improved water quality and quantity that can compete with economic arguments for degrading water quality by converting land for agricultural and development purposes.

Recognizing and calculating the economic benefits of rivers, an emerging field called “ecosystem services,” is an important new area of work within the Great Rivers Partnership. The partnership is incorporating ecosystem services strategies into its focal river projects in the United States, Brazil and China. We'll try to answer questions about what ecosystem services are present in places such as the Yangtze, who is benefiting from these services (like water quality), and what are the downstream impacts for plants, animals and humans from habitat and water flow alterations upstream. Our intent is to use the information obtained to develop a “toolkit” of options for freshwater managers and policymakers that they can put into action on the ground for conservation outcomes.

Critical to the GRP's strategy will be to further develop partnerships with other organizations that have experience in academic research and economic valuation of environmental goods and services. In June 2006, for example, the GRP hosted a workshop at the International Conference on Rivers and Civilization on this topic, bringing in experts from Brazil, Australia and Zambia to present findings in their studies of how ecosystem services can be used to improve biodiversity conservation and people's livelihoods. We are also developing partnerships with groups such as the World Resources Institute to provide a handbook for government development agencies on how to incorporate ecosystem services into development policies internationally.

All of this work is to help the Conservancy make both the ecological and the economic case for biodiversity conservation in a world driven by economic interests, which should lead to greater conservation success in protecting the great rivers of the world.

Peter Bryant

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