Cost–benefit analysis: a decision-support tool or a venue for contesting ecosystem knowledge?

Managing ecosystems for multiple benefits and stakeholders is a formidable challenge requiring diverse knowledge to be discovered, transmitted, and aggregated. Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is advocated as a theoretically grounded decision-support tool, but in practice it frequently appears to exert little influence. To understand this puzzle, I consider ecosystem knowledge and CBA from both the demand and supply sides. I argue that all ecosystem knowledge is contestable, which restricts the influence of technocratic tools like CBA. On the demand side, democratic mechanisms shape decision makers' motivations and incentives, but also provide a substitute for technocratic evidence. Supply-side factors limiting the influence of CBA include the scarcity of decision-pertinent evidence and the uncertain meaning and usefulness of CBA. Demand-side factors are resistant to change; but taking account of them, I suggest some supply-side reforms, arguing that CBA is best regarded not as a tool but as a venue where ecosystem knowledge is aggregated and contested.</jats:p

Asset-building payments for ecosystem services:Assessing landowner perceptions of reforestation incentives in Lebanon

Aim of study: Incentivising landowners to supply ecosystem services remains challenging, especially when this requires long-term investments such as reforestation. We investigated how landowners perceive, and would respond to, distinct types of incentives for planting diverse native trees on private lands in Lebanon. Our aim was to understand landowners’ attitudes towards hypothetical Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) contracts options; their likely participation; and the potential additionality they would provide.  Area of study: Highland villages situated within eight of Lebanon’s 20 Important Plant Areas  Materials and methods: Mixed-methods surveys were conducted with 34 landowners to determine past, present and future land-use strategies. Study participants were presented with three differently structured reforestation contract options (or schemes). The three schemes (results-based loan, action-based grant, and results-based payments) differed in their expected risks and benefits to landowners. Qualitative debriefing questions followed each of the schemes presented.  Main results: Although the results-based loan did deter uptake relative to the lower risk action-based grant, results-based payments did not significantly increase uptake or planting area, suggesting asymmetric attitudes to risk. Qualitative probing revealed economic, social (e.g. trust) and institutional factors (e.g. legal implications of planting forest trees on private land) that limited willingness to participate in the results-based contract option.  Research highlights: This study demonstrates the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand landowner perceptions of incentives and risks, particularly in challenging socio-political contexts

Alien invasions and livelihoods: Economic benefits of invasive Australian Red Claw crayfish in Jamaica

Invasive species have caused widespread economic and environmental disruption, which have been widely studied. However, their potential benefits have received much less attention. If invasive species contribute to livelihoods, their eradication may negatively impact wellbeing. Failing to value these benefits may lead to an undervaluation of invaded ecosystems. We assess the potential economic benefits of an invasive species within an artisanal fishery in Jamaica. We monitored catches over 259 fisherman-days, and conducted 45 semi-structured interviews, with 76 fishermen. We show that the invasive Australian Red Claw crayfish (Cherax quadricarinatus) is an important source of income for fishermen within the Black River Lower Morass of Jamaica and supplement incomes during periods when native shrimp (Macrobrachium spp.) catches decline. We also show that full-time fishermen and those who have no alternative occupations expend the greatest fishing effort. We use the intra-annual variation of fishermen's harvest effort between seasons (when catch per unit effort changes) as a proxy for dependence. Using this measure, we found that the least wealthy appear to be the most dependent on fishing, and consequently benefit the most from the invasive crayfish. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering the potential benefits of invasive species within integrated landscape management

The worldwide costs of marine protected areas

Declines in marine harvests, wildlife, and habitats have prompted calls at both the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and the 2003 World Parks Congress for the establishment of a global system of marine protected areas (MPAs). MPAs that restrict fishing and other human activities conserve habitats and populations and, by exporting biomass, may sustain or increase yields of nearby fisheries. Here we provide an estimate of the costs of a global MPA network, based on a survey of the running costs of 83 MPAs worldwide. Annual running costs per unit area spanned six orders of magnitude, and were higher in MPAs that were smaller, closer to coasts, and in high-cost, developed countries. Models extrapolating these findings suggest that a global MPA network meeting the World Parks Congress target of conserving 20–30% of the world’s seas might cost between $5 billion and$19 billion annually to run and would probably create around one million jobs. Although substantial, gross network costs are less than current government expenditures on harmful subsidies to industrial fisheries. They also ignore potential private gains from improved fisheries and tourism and are dwarfed by likely social gains from increasing the sustainability of fisheries and securing vital ecosystem services

Public preferences for multiple dimensions of bird biodiversity at the coast: insights for the cultural ecosystem services framework

This work was funded by the NERC Research project Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (CBESS) project Grant NE/J015644/1 with support from the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS) programme. BESS is a six-year programme (2011–2017) funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) as part of the UK's Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) programme.Biodiversity is valuable to society, including through its contribution to cultural benefits: “the non-material benefits people obtain from biodiversity and ecosystem services through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences”. Biodiversity encompasses numerous measures, but the distinct values of these measures have been little studied. We conducted a discrete choice experiment to elicit respondents’ (n = 3,000) willingness to pay for increases in four measures of bird diversity in UK coastal ecosystems: number of bird species (species richness), number of individual birds (abundance), probability of seeing rare or unusual bird species, and probability of seeing large flocks of birds (wildlife spectacles). Respondents had a positive willingness to pay (through one-time voluntary donations) for increases in all four measures (mean £3 to £5 per household). However, using latent class analysis we found considerable heterogeneity of preferences, identifying four classes of respondents with strikingly different levels of marginal willingness to pay for the four measures. Income, age, environmental activity, visits to environmental settings, and gender were important determinants of class membership. While focusing on birds, our results demonstrate the importance of a multi-dimensional conceptualisation of biodiversity in broader ecosystem management, rather than focussing on a single aspect such as species richness or abundance. Our findings also highlight the implications of heterogeneous public preferences for biodiversity for conservationists, planners, shoreline managers and developers. These need to be considered in the development of new frameworks for ecosystem services, and when planning and funding conservation actions so that the cultural benefits will accrue across a range of social groups.PostprintPeer reviewe

Can REDD+ social safeguards reach the ‘right’ people? Lessons from Madagascar

AbstractThere is extensive debate about the potential impact of the climate mechanism REDD+ on the welfare of forest-dwelling people. To provide emission reductions, REDD+ must slow the rate of deforestation and forest degradation: such a change will tend to result in local opportunity cost to farmers at the forest frontier. Social safeguard processes to mitigate negative impacts of REDD+ are being developed and can learn from existing safeguard procedures such as those implemented by the World Bank. Madagascar has a number of REDD+ pilot projects with World Bank support including the Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena (CAZ). Nearly two thousand households around the corridor have been identified as ‘project affected persons’ (PAPs) and given compensation. We compare households identified as project affected persons with those not identified. We found households with more socio-political power locally, those with greater food security, and those that are more accessible were more likely to be identified as eligible for compensation while many people likely to be negatively impacted by the REDD+ project did not receive compensation. We identify three issues which make it difficult for a social safeguard assessment to effectively target the households for compensation: (a) poor information on location of communities and challenging access means that information does not reach remote households; (b) reluctance of people dependant on shifting agriculture to reveal this due to government sanctions; and (c) reliance by safeguard assessors on non-representative local institutions. We suggest that in cases where the majority of households are likely to bear costs and identification of affected households is challenging, the optimal, and principled, strategy may be blanket compensation offered to all the households in affected communities; avoiding the dead weight costs of ineffective safeguard assessments. The Paris Agreement in December 2015 recognised REDD+ as a key policy instrument for climate change mitigation and explicitly recognised the need to respect human rights in all climate actions. However, safeguards will be prone to failure unless those entitled to compensation are aware of their rights and enabled to seek redress where safeguards fail. This research shows that existing safeguard commitments are not always being fulfilled and those implementing social safeguards in REDD+ should not continue with business as usual

(−)‐[ 18 F]Flubatine: evaluation in rhesus monkeys and a report of the first fully automated radiosynthesis validated for clinical use

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/101867/1/jlcr3069.pd

Nitric oxide increases gain in the ventral cochlear nucleus of guinea pigs with tinnitus

Previous work has led to the hypothesis that, during the production of noise‐induced tinnitus, higher levels of nitric oxide (NO), in the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN), increase the gain applied to a reduced input from the cochlea. To test this hypothesis, we noise‐exposed 26 guinea pigs, identified evidence of tinnitus in 12 of them and then compared the effects of an iontophoretically applied NO donor or production inhibitor on VCN single unit activity. We confirmed that the mean driven firing rate for the tinnitus and control groups were the same while it had fallen in the non‐tinnitus group. By contrast, the mean spontaneous rate had increased for the tinnitus group relative to control while it remained the same for the non‐tinnitus group. A greater proportion of units responded to exogenously applied NO in the tinnitus (56%) and non‐tinnitus groups (71%) than a control population (24%). In the tinnitus group, endogenous NO facilitated the driven firing rate in 37% (7/19) of neurons and appeared to bring the mean driven rate back up to control levels by a mechanism involving N‐Methyl‐D‐aspartic acid (NMDA) receptors. By contrast, in the non‐tinnitus group, endogenous NO only facilitated the driven firing rate in 5% (1/22) of neurons and there was no facilitation of driven rate in the control group. The effects of endogenous NO on spontaneous activity were unclear. These results suggest that NO is involved in increasing the gain applied to driven activity but other factors are also involved in the increase in spontaneous activity

Work Package Report 6: Shared, plural and cultural values of ecosystems – Summary

Key findings: Finding 1: Shared values resulting from deliberative, group-based valuation are different from individual values. Case study evidence suggests that they are more informed, considered, confident and reflective of participants’ deeper-held, transcendental values. Deliberated, group-based monetary values may be a better reflection of real welfare impacts than non-deliberated individual values, if derived through a carefully designed and managed process. Although more research is needed to expand the currently small evidence base on deliberative monetary methods, group deliberation has the potential to significantly enhance elicitation of values. Finding 2: The ethical, moral and justice dimensions of many environmental issues necessitate approaches that allow for the elicitation of shared and plural values. Key ethical concerns include: 1) providing a space and opportunity for people to identify values that they may find difficult to articulate (e.g. spiritual, identity); 2) recognising that some values cannot be traded without discussion and negotiation (e.g. the legal or felt rights of local people, intrinsic values of other species); and 3) understanding that it is often difficult to isolate valuation from decision-making processes because people feel there are strong ethical or moral issues at stake that need to be debated (e.g. the justice of the process, fairness in the distribution of benefits or disbenefits, responsibility, and issues of sustainability and future generations). Finding 3: Catalyst and/or conflict points can play a key role in the emergence and articulation of values at a societal or community level that have not previously been outwardly or explicitly articulated. Catalyst and conflict points can be symbolic and are often linked to wider contested issues and meanings about who is involved in decision-making, whose voice counts and who receives the benefits or disbenefits of environmental change. These catalyst points can potentially be connected to feelings of powerlessness that give rise to concern and protest. By recognising transcendental societal and communal values (the deeper-held and overarching values held by society and communities), it becomes possible to make these values explicit and incorporate them in decision-making to better anticipate and manage conflicts. Finding 4: There is a diversity of ways in which shared, plural, cultural and social values are used, but they are rarely conceptualised. The UK NEAFO provides a clear theoretical framework that distinguishes and categorises different dimensions and types of shared values. The proposed range of value types was both identifiable and distinguishable within case study results. This suggests that the framework provides a useful basis for operationalizing shared values for decision-making. Finding 5: Shared and social values in the sense of value to society is conceptualised very differently by conventional economics and other disciplines. Neoclassical economists have generally undertaken valuation by equating social value with the aggregate of individual values. They consider values as fundamentally commensurable. In contrast, literature from other disciplines consistently considers values as plural, not just in the sense that multiple things have value, but also that there are multiple dimensions to value that cannot necessarily be captured in a single metric. Within mainstream economics, the difficulties associated with commensurability and aggregating values have long been recognised, but have also been neglected. An interesting area for future debate between economic and non-economic views on values may be the normative nature of value-aggregation. Finding 6: A mixed method approach is required to elicit the multiple dimensions of shared values and to translate deeper-held, transcendental values into contextual values and preferences. Monetary valuation is limited to quantifying values. Other methods are needed to understand their meaning or content, and the communal, societal and transcendental values that underpin them. Psychometric, non-analytical and interpretive methods (e.g. storytelling) can reveal those shared values. They can be combined with deliberative-analytical methods (e.g. deliberative monetary valuation and multi-criteria analysis) to provide a comprehensive valuation that can quantify values, understand their individual and shared meanings and significance, and better include ethical dimensions. Finding 7: Deliberative and social learning processes help people to understand the values held by others; they can lead to increased sharing of values and/or to greater acceptance of the decisions emerging from such processes. Deliberation clearly affects what values participants express compared to non-deliberated processes. There is also a growing body of theoretical and empirical research suggesting that deliberation has the potential to affect how people understand and shape the values of others. Although rarely considered in the economic literature, the concept of social learning helps to explain some of the processes involved in deliberation. The extent to which deliberation or social learning helps participants express and shape values will depend upon the frequency and depth of interactions and the timescale over which interactions occur. Only a shift in cultural values (e.g. less emphasis on material wealth), reflected in other societal institutions (e.g. changes in the indicators used to measure national progress) is likely to achieve sustainable outcomes in the long-term. Finding 8: Media analysis is a promising avenue for characterising different types of shared values at a large scale, as well as assessing the conflicts between the communal values of different sectors of society. There has been a marked increase in public interest in environmental issues over the last decade, which is reflected in their increased media coverage. Media content and discourse analysis is able to distinguish and characterise the plurality of cultural, societal and transcendental values and their interrelationships, and can offer a picture of the self- and other-regarding values that underpin environmental issues and conflicts. Social media can provide a further forum for understanding societal and communal values surrounding environmental issues. Finding 9: Aesthetic and spiritual values of ecosystems have a strong non-instrumental component. While they benefit human well-being, they should not simply be classified as just ‘services’ or ‘benefits’. Many spiritual discourses about nature resist talk of consequentialist benefits and economic analysis. These discourses counter assertions of the disenchantment of the world, which is associated with an instrumental environmental ethic and the commodification of nature. Allowing the possibility of enchantment can be a richer way of understanding our experience of nature and alerts us to the limitations of using economic models for valuation and informing decisions about these profound cultural ecosystem ‘services’. Faith communities have experience of using these non-utilitarian values in their own decision-making and provide models that could be adapted for use in environmental decision-making. Finding 10: Subjective well-being measures provide a useful means of assessing ‘intangible’ cultural ecosystem services and their benefits. Different user groups associate common elements of subjective well-being with environmental settings, providing opportunities for development of standardised measures. In the UK NEAFO, key facets of well-being associated with places in nature across different user groups included: engagement with nature (incorporating elements of connectedness, getting to know nature and the beauty of nature, and taking care of a place); therapeutic benefits (including physical and mental aspects of health); place identity (including a sense of place and belonging); spiritual value (in the sense of feeling connected or responsible to something larger than oneself); social bonding with others; and transformative and memorable experiences. Further empirical work with different user groups and environmental settings would allow for the continued development of a standardised tool for large-scale non-monetary assessment of cultural ecosystem services