printable versionQ&A with Gretchen Daily, Woods Institute fellow and professor of biological sciences
Gretchen Daily
Teddy Roosevelt said it nearly a century ago: "The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value." Today, a growing number of prominent conservationists, including Stanford ecologist Gretchen Daily, are taking Roosevelt at his word.
In October 2006, Daily, a professor of biological sciences and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, helped launch the Natural Capital Project, an international effort to create an "economic realism, where societies would manage ecosystems like the precious natural assets they are." The project—a collaboration of the Woods Institute, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) —is looking for practical ways to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable: What is the dollar value of a wetland? Can you put a price tag on a rainforest and the many services it provides humanity?
In the following interview with Mark Shwartz, Daily describes a unique software system called InVEST that is being developed by the Natural Capital Project and is designed to answer these kinds of questions. InVEST may soon be in the hands of conservationists worldwide, she says, providing them a tool for quantifying the value of natural ecosystems before they disappear.
Q: What does the term "natural capital" mean?
A: There are two kinds of natural capital: living and non-living. Non-living natural capital includes mineral resources—oil, diamonds, things like that. We're concerned with living natural capital, or ecosystem capital, which, depending on how you manage it, provides a suite of benefits that flow to society.
Our goal is to bring visibility to these benefits and show how one can actually get a really high return on investing in living natural capital through conservation. The situation today is that natural capital is routinely ignored in decision decision-making. The problem is that we've been rapidly depleting and degrading our natural capital base, so that now the demand is higher than ever for natural capital that provides clean water, pollination of our crops, beauty, serenity and all the other ecosystem services that people get from nature.
Q: How does the Natural Capital Project address that?
A: We want to make it easy for decision-makers to assess natural capital stocks in both biophysical and economic terms. Our first big effort is developing what's basically a calculator of the value of natural capital that we're calling InVEST—Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs. This is a software system that will let you put in basic data on your place to determine the potential for producing all the things we get from ecosystems, not only crops and other commodities but climate stability, flood control services, ecotourism and so forth.
And then we ask, what are the main threats in the future? After doing that assessment, the key is to figure out what sorts of policy and financial interventions would spur the investments that are needed to protect the natural capital.
Q: When will the software be ready for prime time?
A: The user interface will be developed within six to 12 months. Once it's tested, we'll implement it in our four primary sites—China, California, Hawaii and Tanzania—and in a suite of satellite sites, so that we get early feedback on how useful it is and how to improve it. Initially, it's going to require some technical expertise to use, so our first round of tests is going to be with TNC and WWF. They're by far the biggest conservation actors in the world. If they can incorporate it into their decision making, that would be tremendous.
Q: How much will the software cost?
A: We'd like to make sure it's widely accessible. In the nonprofit world, I think it will be distributed for free, and we'll try to get the resources ourselves to offer training to use it. But we might want to sell InVEST to corporations. For example, Coca-Cola just gave $20 million to WWF. They're very interested in maintaining water quality in all of the places they work. Many energy companies are interested, because often they have very extensive landholdings.
Q: Are any developers on board with this?
A: Absolutely. In many different parts of the private sector, we're up against resource shortages already. Everybody sees that we're living on a finite planet, and that we've got to have real metrics and universally agreed upon ways of calculating things.
For the kinds of investments we need to flow into conservation, there has to be a clear, compelling way of understanding what the return on investment will be, and you've got to enlist people in the private sector where the resources are who are making these investments for selfish reasons. If we could find a way to do logging or mining, for example, and invest in natural capital at the same time, that would be the most beautiful outcome.
Mark Shwartz is communications manager at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.