Total Resource Management and
Ecosystem Services
Recently, I watched a webinar meeting of
the California Water Plan Update. John Lowry of the
Department of Conservation talked about Total Resource
Management and ecosystem services.
http://www.waterplan.water.ca.gov/docs/meeting_materials/ac/06.29.11/4a-regionalplanning-doc-jl.pdf
The approach implements the California Natural Resources
Agency’s 2010 Action Plan for the Future of Natural
Resources Management
http://www.floodplain.org/cmsAdmin/uploads/IRM_Action_Plan12-10.pdf
It also seems to dovetail with the U.S. Forest Services’
new “All Lands” approach..
Total Resources Management is: “A
planning and decision making process that coordinates
resource use so that the long term sustainable benefits
are optimized and conflicts among users are minimized.
IRM [Integrated Resource Management] brings together all
resource groups rather than each working in isolation to
balance the economic, environmental, and social
requirements of society.”
The 2010 State Action Plan indicates that
old laws and policies were created when natural
resources were considered abundant and resilient.
“Climate change, growth, and increased competition for
these resources require a new era of strategic thinking,
leadership, and unifying policies and actions designed
to preserve and restore our natural resources for long-term
sustainability and for the benefits of all citizens. “
(Apparently, individual private property rights are no
longer in vogue in California.)
Lowry indicated that the components of an
ecosystem (hydrology, biology, geology and social
systems) interact to create “ecosystem services.” These
include: clean air and water; reducing the severity of
floods, droughts, winds and waves; detoxification and
decomposition of wastes; soil and soil fertility;
pollination; control of agricultural pests; dispersal of
seed; nutrient cycling; biodiversity; protection from
ultraviolet rays; stabilization of climate change;
moderation of temperature extremes; diverse human
cultures; beauty and spiritual sustenance. Ecosystems
must be managed for diversity and resilience to allow
them to respond to change and continue to provide
ecosystem services to humans and other populations over
the long term.
The new management approach will have
greater public involvement, emphasize “inclusiveness”
and integrate federal, state, tribal, regional and local
goals. According to Lowry, integration of management
efforts will incrementally become more commonly used as
“traditional methods fail to achieve anticipated
results” causing a collapse of the old management
system. Further work will be done to define specific
ecosystem services of benefit to the public and to
determine the management strategies that need to be in
place to sustainably produce those services.
Michael Perrone from the Water Plan team
talked about the new finance strategy to pay for
restoration and to protect natural lands from human
impact in order to provide ecosystem services. It is
possible to valuate the benefits of
restoration/protection by calculating the “avoided
costs” of conflicts or by calculating the price it costs
to provide what we need artificially. For instance, one
can calculate the costs of the loss of “nature’s goods “
such as fish production, erosion control through
floodplains, clean water through wetland filtration,
groundwater recharge from open land and carbon
sequestration from forests by looking at the costs to
construct hatcheries, levees, and water treatment
plants.
http://www.waterplan.water.ca.gov/docs/meeting_materials/ac/06.29.11/4b-EcoServices-ACmeeting-jun11-mp+kc.pdf
Looking at the costs of seven recently
constructed fish hatcheries, a new hatchery would cost
from $10-30 million. There are 835,000 feet of rip rap
on the Sacramento, which would be worth $2.6 billion
in today’s dollars. It cost $15 million to build a new
water treatment plant in
Santa Monica with a capacity to
treat about 320,000 gallons a day. It cost $175 million
to upgrade a water treatment plant in
San Bruno.
Presumably, investments would be made in protection and
restoration as an alternative to investing in the
traditional artificial solutions.
Additional research indicates that there
are already worldwide markets trading in compensatory
offsets (mitigation banking) for impacts to biodiversity
and ecosystem services.
http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/documents/acrobat/sbdmr.pdf
Like carbon credit trading, the scheme requires that
human impacts be offset in a no net loss (or full
mitigation.) This is accomplished by purchasing shares
in a fund that will be used to protect or restore land.
(In my opinion, this is a scheme by wealthy
environmental brokers such as Mr. Gore to grow even
wealthier.) Unfortunately, this can mean that rural
lands are increasingly “protected” from human use, which
can mean leaving rural communities without access to or
use of the natural resources that form their economic
base.
http://users.sisqtel.net/armstrng/ecosystem_services.htm
Regional Forester Randy Moore recently
indicated that he had been in dialogue with municipal
water districts in the central valley, downriver from
mountain communities. He was trying to get them
interested in investing in the “ecosystem services and
the restoration of national forest rivers to avoid some
of their costs such as water filtration of sediment. I
am not certain that creating additional powerful
stakeholders interested in the management of mountain
natural resources is such a grand idea.
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