Money! Money! Money!

How is your ‘natural capital’ doing?  Are you getting good value from your ‘ecosystem services’?

If you don’t have the faintest notion what I’m talking about then it is possible that you are not at the cutting edge of current environmental thinking.  These are terms in the new lexicon of market based ecology.  According to this school of thought we have to recognize the economic value of nature in order to safeguard it.  The reason we have been so cavalier in destroying our natural environment is because we don’t recognize what it’s worth.  If you regard nature as worthless and infinite then of course it is expendable.  If you can put a monetary value on ‘green infrastructure’, forests, hills, rivers etc. in the jargon of this philosophy, then you will go a long way to ensuring their survival.

The UK government is at the forefront of this movement.  The Natural Capital Committee was established last year ‘to provide independent expert advice on the state of English ‘natural capital’.  It reports not to the Environment Secretary but to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

 

‘Natural capital’ is simply ‘nature’. ‘Ecosystem services’ are natural processes that benefit mankind, as if helping man was the whole point of nature.  For instance if bees didn’t naturally pollinate our crops as an ‘ecosystem service’ we would presumably have to get the local council to do it.  But surely man’s tendency to put himself outside the natural world, rather than as a player in it, is the root of most of our present and historical ecological issues?

There is no question, that mankind benefits enormously from natural processes in all kinds of ways.  Forests and oceans act as carbon sinks, rivers and lakes provide drinking water and places of recreation, upland moors regulate water runoff and prevent flooding of lowland cities, and so on.  In 1958 in China Mao Zedong launched a famous campaign to extirpate sparrows, which were charged with stealing the peasants’ rice.  Millions of sparrows were killed as the birds were driven to near extinction.  In the following years rice yields plummeted as the crops were ravaged by insects, and an estimated 20 million people died of starvation.  Far from being a pest, the birds had been providing an ‘ecosystem service’.

If we can adequately recognise these beneficial effects in advance then we can balance the value that nature provides alongside the proposed ‘benefits’ of destroying it.

It’s tempting to dismiss this way of thinking as some sort of neoliberal market based snake oil being peddled by right wing politicians and businessmen, the very people environmentalist have been fighting against for years.  And it’s true that when ecologists start speaking the language of economists it’s bankers who are the first to recognise the opportunities.  In Wall Street and Canary Wharf people in investment banks are trying to work out how to measure ‘blended revenue streams’ including contributions from nature along with traditional economic valuations of land.  Could such ecosystem services be securitised and then traded on a new green exchange?  If ecology can be ascribed a monetary value then it becomes possible to trade offsets.  A company can destroy a forest in one place by paying for another one to be created elsewhere.

Yet the idea has gained traction with some deep green environmentalists too.  Tony Jupiter is a former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) with a string of green credentials to his name.  In his recent book, “What Has Nature Ever Done For Us”, he argues that he and others have spent decades campaigning for the protection of nature for its own sake and, despite occasional victories, the trend has been one of managed retreat.  The moral argument does not seem to be enough.  Only by recognising that the environment has an economic value that can facilitate economic growth will we prevent the further destruction of forests, loss of soils, depletion of aquifers, extinction of animals and plants and plunder of the oceans.

This way of thinking is increasingly common in environmental debates.  In the recent fight to get the EU to apply restrictions on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides, various bodies calculated the potential economic loss to Europe if bees and other pollinators were not available to provide free pollination as an ‘ecosystem service’.  (The Soil Association put the figure at £430m per annum for the UK alone.)  Indeed these arguments may have helped sway the argument in favour of a limited ban.

In making the case for new Marine Protected Areas on the Scottish seabed, the Marine Link Taskforce claimed that MPAs could be worth £10bn to the Scottish economy by “mitigating against extreme weather impacts, boosting fisheries and securing Scotland's tourism appeal.”

While I definitely do not think the environment is worthless or infinite I have a number of serious concerns with this approach.

While it is theoretically possible to put an economic value on ecosystems or large geographical features, how do you calculate the ‘natural capital’ of individual species?  Would the Kenyan safari industry collapse if there were no rhino left to satisfy the tourists?  Of course not, as long as there are lions, giraffes and all the rest.  What about butterflies or penguins or cowslips?  Are any of them worth saving for their economic value?

What happens if you calculate the value of ‘natural capital’ of a given environmental feature and it doesn’t outweigh the economic benefits of its destruction?  By this measure the Dutch sailors who drove the dodo to extinction while hunting them for meat made the right decision.

One such test will be Lodge Hill in Kent.  This former MoD training ground is home to one of the largest populations of nightingales in the UK, a species which is on the RSPB’s Endangered List.  The government is keen to develop the site.  5,000 new homes will provide jobs and growth, yet Natural England, the government’s own environmental watchdog, has declared the area a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) which effectively precludes development.  Supposedly the issue has had Chancellor George Osborne complaining about ‘feathered obstacles’ to development, and somewhat sinisterly Prime Minister, David Cameron, has told Environment Minister, Owen Paterson, to ‘get it sorted’.  If either the nightingales or Natural England survive, clearly it will not be because of their economic benefit.

Arguably humans have always put an economic value on the environment.  Many invasive species were introduced specifically to enhance that value, to increase the ROI in contemporary financial parlance. Pheasants were introduced to England, and are now fiercely protected by the shooting industry to the direct detriment of our native raptors. Rabbits, originally brought to Australia to provide food for European settlers are now regarded as the most significant known factor in species loss in that continent.  Surely, both of these initiatives were attempts to enhance the value of ‘ecosystem services’ provided by nature. What if you read the arguments about trees providing a carbon sink but decide that imported, non native varieties do it better?  Exposing nature to free market forces is not guaranteed to achieve ecologically sound outcomes.  In fact it’s almost guaranteed not to.

As Joni Mitchel observed, it is very often easier to see what you’ve lost than to understand the true value of what of you are destroying.  Plus, it is quite normal that the people who potentially benefit from environmental destruction are rarely the same as those who lose out.  Everyone’s personal cost benefit analysis looks different. Many adverse environmental changes are brought about with only good intentions.  Farmers in the North Yorkshire Moors who were encouraged to drain peat bogs to improve the land for sheep grazing had no notion that their efforts would cost the denizens of Richmond and York millions in repairing flood damage.

We are getting better both at modeling potential unintended impacts of environmental changes, and at ensuring that those companies who destroy landscapes pay for their restoration.  To this extent, factoring the whole life cost in to a project and not merely calculating the profits to be made say from extracting oil or metals are welcome.  But you can’t replace a thousand year old forest or replace an extinct species when the wells run dry. Nightingales migrate for thousands of miles and then return the precise tree where they were born.  How will we explain to them that their home has now been relocated 100 miles down the A3? Turn right at Petersfield, you can’t miss it!

However, my greatest concern is that commoditising nature and reducing everything around us to its dollar value, is to lose sight of the very thing we are trying to preserve, and also to lose sight of our own humanity. I want to conserve the planet and every living thing on it not because it may have some potential use of value to me, but because nature is beautiful and wonderful in its own right.  We may have evolved to the point where we no longer see ourselves as part of nature.  All the more reason then, that we should regard ourselves as stewards of the environment and do what we can to protect and nurture wildlife for its own sake.

 For me environmentalism is about values not value. I admire the King James Bible as a wonderful piece of literature, and the phrase that comes to mind the most readily in this context is this one:

“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

Bee in my Bonnet

I don’t like to go on, but this is an issue that simply refuses to lie down.

The plot so far.

You may remember that last month Britain and Germany abstained in a crucial EU vote which aimed to introduce restrictions on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides which have been widely implicated in killing bees and other pollinators.  The proposal for a two year ban on the use of neonics on a range of specific crops, followed advice received by the European Food Safety Authority. (EFSA)  The details are in my earlier blog “The Plight of the Humble Bee”.

The position of Britain’s Owen Paterson, the Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is that the science is inconclusive, the cost benefits analysis unclear and he intends to wait for DEFRA’s own trials before making any commitments.

That sounds reasonable.

Prof. Ian Boyd

However Paterson’s own chief scientific advisor, Prof. Ian Boyd of St Andrew’s University, admits that insufficient testing has been carried out to inform a proper cost benefit analysis.  He agrees that in twenty years of use, it is unacceptable that that the manufacturers have not published clear data one way or the other.  In fact the agrochemicals companies who make neonics have spent a fortune trying to prove that bee decline is primarily caused by the parasitic varroa mite.  Meanwhile a growing number of peer reviewed research reports do support the view that neonicotinoids are a major factor in pollinator decline.

But is a cost-benefit analysis the appropriate way to go about this?  How do you compare the financial benefit of biodiversity with the costs of implementing bans or restrictions?  Actually, The Scottish Wildlife Trust, which supports the ban, does try to do just that.  “Bees and other pollinating insects play a vital role in food production, worth approximately £43 million/yr to Scotland’s economy.”  Obviously the figure for the entire UK would be several times greater than that.  Although they also point out that “Most… plant communities rely on pollinating insects to reproduce and therefore spread. They also form a vital part of the food chain for other species such as birds, reptiles and amphibians. It follows that any insecticide that drastically reduces pollinator numbers will have effects beyond the agricultural sector and will ultimately affect the health and function of entire ecosystems.”

And what of DEFRA’s own trials, referred to by Mr. Paterson?  On 27^th February, Prof. Boyd gave evidence to the UK Environmental Audit Committee at which he admitted that their field trials had been seriously compromised by contamination from neonicotinoids and stated that at the control site of the bumblebee study, there were residues of neonicotinoids in pollen and nectar.  In other words, bees range so widely to find nectar, that it was impossible to isolate a colony from the effects of these insecticides in order to conduct comparative trials.  Surely that highlights the scale of the problem and reinforces the need for restrictions as the only way to assess the impact of neonics?

Currently, Prof Boyd conceded, there are no relevant trials in the pipeline which might influence DEFRA’s stance.

Are we sure neonicotinoids are to blame?

 PAN, The Pesticide Action Network, which also unsurprisingly supports the ban, is very clear.

“Honey bee losses and population declines are certainly multi-factored, [their bold] involving reduction in adequate and good quality foraging sources, habitat degradation, reduced immune system defences to parasites and diseases, as well as increased exposure to neonicotinoids.”   But doesn’t that make it all the more important that we do what we can to avoid needlessly adding to the problem.

Plus other circumstantial evidence also points towards neonics as a major culprit.

Colony Collapse Disorder was first noticed within two or three years of neonics being introduced.

Many species of wild bee and other pollinators have also seen catastrophic population declines over this period and they are not susceptible to varroa mites.

Italy introduced a ban on seed treatment of maize by three neonicotinoids in Autumn 2008.  At the same time, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture set up APENET as the official monitoring agency for the trials.  Since the ban no cases of hive collapse have been reported in the crucial Spring sowing period, compared with 185 cases in the preceding year.  And Winter losses, always a factor in beekeeping, have also declined from 37.5% in 2008 to 15% in 2011, indicating an all round improvement in bee health.

So where are we now?

Mr Paterson’s problem is that his orders from the Prime Minister are unequivocal.  “Don’t do anything that might damage economic growth.”  Syngenta, one of the two major manufacturers of neonicotinoids, employs 2,000 people in the UK and Ireland.  The other big manufacturer is Bayer and Germany joined the UK in abstaining in last month’s vote.  Quite clearly, Paterson is putting short term economic expediency ahead of the long term health of the environment.

Fortunately, it is not too late for the Secretary of State to make amends.  Next week, on April 29^th, the EU Commissioner for Health & Consumer Policy, Tonio Borg, will take his case to the European Commission's Appeal Committee.  He is entitled to do this since there was no overall majority of the 27member states.  Mr. Borg deserves much credit for retaining his proposal intact and refusing to water it down in the face of intense lobbying by the chemicals industry.

Currently, Mr. Paterson is saying publicly that he will oppose the ban.  But the temperature is rising on all sides.

On March 20^th, immediately following his abstention, the minister complained of a cyber attack when he received over 80,000 emails demanding he take action to help bees.

On April 3rd, the influential, cross party Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee issued a report accusing DEFRA of ‘extraordinary complacency’ in this matter.  The Department, it said, was relying on ‘fundamentally flawed’ studies and failing to uphold its own precautionary principle. It continued, "We believe that the weight of scientific evidence now warrants precautionary action."

Further influential reports published by Greenpeace (Bees in Decline) April 9th, and one by a team of 40 scientists from 27 institutions published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, on April 22 both demanded coordinated action to help bee populations.

Last week, as reported on this blog, the supermarket chain, Waitrose, introduced its own ban on produce from farms using neonicotinoids.

Yesterday, the Bulgarian Prime Minister, Marin Raykov, announced that his country would be changing its position to support the ban.  Addressing a protest rally of beekeepers from all over Bulgaria he stated,  “If we fail to pay attention to the problem with bees today, tomorrow we shall have nothing to eat,".

In the UK, Internet lobby group 38 Degrees will deliver a petition signed by 250,000 people to Owen Paterson tomorrow, and this will be followed on Friday by a march on Parliament jointly organized by Avaaz, Buglife, Environmental Justice Foundation, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network UK, RSPB, and the Soil Association.

Mr. Paterson’s record on green issues is not encouraging.  Apart from failing to protect pollinators, he has personally lobbied to loosen restrictions on GMO use across the EU, he has made some very unfortunate comments about birds of prey, he is ploughing ahead with the badger cull in the face of mounting public and scientific opposition, and his department has completely fumbled the ball on implementing Marine Conservation Zones.  Does he now want to go down as the man who destroyed Europe’s agricultural sector by killing all our bees?

Heat and Dust

I’ve been in India for just over a month now.  In that time the day time temperatures have soared from a pleasant 28 degrees to a blistering 36.  Outside of our compound the landscape is brown and shriveled. Choking red dust gets everywhere.  It makes you want to shower several times a day, and at night sleep is only possible with the AC on

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No doubt this collective extra demand for power is the root cause of the power cuts which, always fairly frequent, now affect us daily.  There has also been another memo from ‘the management’ to all residents warning that the consumption of water is unsustainable and getting worse.  Already there is a moratorium on washing cars, although this is widely ignored.  Now they say if the situation doesn’t change they may have to drain the swimming pool!

No doubt the problem is exacerbated by the ubiquitous Reverse Osmosis machines fitted in almost every house and apartment.  The RO machines plumbed into the mains take the widely distrusted tap water and produce sparkling pure potable water.  But for every glass of Adam’s ale they give, over two litres of waste water is poured down the sink.  Of course we try to make use of what we can, collecting it in jugs and using it to water the pot plants.  But it becomes a bit oppressive, and there’s only so much that the plants can drink.  But over consumption is merely the proximate cause of the drought.  The roots go much deeper and wider.

Bangalore is classified as a tropical savannah region.  Average yearly rainfall here is 975mm (38 inches), not much less than Manchester’s, but nearly all of that occurs during the five months of the year when the monsoons blow.

As something of a boom town the city and surrounding region has seen spectacular growth in the past few decades.  In 1961 the population was 1.2m, the sixth largest city in India.  Today, driven by manufacturing, IT and even the Indian space programme, the population now stands at around 9m, the third largest in India.  That number includes a higher proportion of affluent middle class Indians who expect to enjoy a first world standard of living.  However, the region saw heated disputes over water 100 years ago, and all that extra population only makes the situation worse.

 A beautiful new airport opened 40km North West of the city in 2008.  It compares favourably with any similar new airport in Asia: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kansai etc.  It has brought a great influx of private investment to the North of the city.   New hotels, restaurants and above all countless new condominiums and walled residential developments are springing up all across the region.  This includes the one where I am staying, which is barely four years old.  But where is the infrastructure to support this growth? Road surfaces are gradually being improved.  There is even a new over overhead expressway linking the airport with the downtown area, or there would be if the money hadn’t dried up half way through.  But what about electricity, or even more pertinently water?

There are few rivers and virtually no standing water.  For domestic use as well as for industry or agriculture, water here comes from boreholes.  But every year they have to go deeper.  According to the Times of India, current wells reach down 1,000 metres to find an adequate supply, and new technology is being sought to extend the range to 2,000 metres.  When one borehole dries up they immediately make plans to sink another, seemingly unaware that the aquifers are all connected underground.

Planning has something of a bad name these days in the west.  In the post communist world it smacks of state interference and petty bureaucracy. In the UK, David Cameron’s libertarian government has fought a sustained campaign against the planners blaming regulation and red tape for holding up much needed growth.  But he and other like minded politicians should take a look at Bangalore.

India is making great strides towards solar power, playing to a natural strength.  Presumably the power cuts will eventually be sorted out.  But where will the water come from?  In the end it may be this more than any other factor that puts a natural cap on development here.

Marine Wildlife Deserves Better Than This

One tries to be topical but it isn’t everyday that one of my blogs gets an immediate response from a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State.  Only yesterday I discussed government plans to act on only 31 out of 127 recommended sites for Marine Conservation Zones, and this morning the Fisheries minister, Richard Benyon, is reported by the BBC explaining that he just doesn’t have the dosh.

My own hubris does not extend to believing that the dozen or so page views my piece has received overnight might include the erstwhile minister.  That would put me on a par with the editor of the Skibbereen Eagle who told Kaiser Bill that his illustrious newspaper ‘had his eye on’ the German emperor.  As I reported yesterday plenty of more significant voices than my own have been raised in support of this cause including: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Marine Conservation Society.

What is significant however is the shift in the government’s position.  Until now their argument has been that in the 96 sites not selected the science was unclear.  Heaven forbid that they might accidentally protect something that is not actually critically endangered.  However, in the report by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, Mr Benyon admits that he would like to go further but cuts to the DEFRA budget mean that he simply doesn’t have the money needed to assess sites and put in place the necessary conservation measures.

The one concession he does make is to say that his department will release proposals for a second set of MCZs along with his decision on the first tranche.  Previously there had been no clear commitment to doing anything beyond the original 31 sites.

So the government’s argument comes down to saying, times are hard, we are all having to tighten our belts and Britain’s sea creatures will have to shoulder their share of the problem.  We’ll look at it again when resources are more plentiful.

The trouble with that argument is that for many endangered species or habitats this is literally a matter of life and death.  Failure to act now could have dire consequences for decades to come, and for some species it might be terminal.  The government has ring-fenced from cuts the Overseas Aid budget, currently running at about £12 billion per year.  Implementing the full list of proposed MCZs would cost less than a thousandth part of that amount.

But then out of sight is out of mind.  The bottom of the ocean is about as far out of sight as you can get.  Plus it's difficult to get sentimental for a sea slug or a sponge.  And yet we have seen time and again that it is often the smallest and least cuddly organisms that underpin the entire ecological model.

Richard Benyon is the fisheries minister who was unable to identify more than two common fish from a selection of 12 popular varieties eaten in the UK.  As minister responsible for wildlife he came under criticism last year for felling 218 acres of woodland on his family estate to allow extraction of aggregates, and of course he works for Owen Paterson, the environment secretary who believes Europe needs agrochemical companies more than it needs bees.  Is it just me or is the claim to be the ‘greenest government ever’, wearing just a little thin?