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EPA and NatGeo: Putting a Price on Paradise
Posted: February 4, 2009
Singer Joni Mitchell crooned, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Today the presence of thousands of parking lots in the United States illustrates just one example of how human-induced change can negatively affect the benefits — or ecosystem services — provided by the environment that we have come to rely upon to live.
What are ecosystem services?
In essence, ecosystem services are nature’s bounty. Ecosystems provide our food, our clothes, our fuels and many of the commodities used to manufacture the products we use in our day-to-day lives. Less well recognized, ecosystems also purify and store our water, help clean our air, regulate our climate, provide protection from natural hazards such as hurricanes, pollinate our crops and manage our pests. They have the amazing ability to process and detoxify our wastes. Ecosystems also give us places to play and reflect along with contributing to our cultural, inspirational, and intellectual well-being by providing a sense of place.
Human activities, however, have an impact on ecosystem services. For example, when we pave the natural landscape with a hard (impervious) surface, we gain a useful commodity but we also may lose something. Soil and vegetation provide a natural filter for removing pollutants carried by storm water runoff, facilitating groundwater recharge which provides us with drinking water, and regulating the amount of runoff or flooding that may occur during a storm event. The impervious surface becomes an unrestricted pathway for motor oil, gasoline, harmful bacteria, and other pollutants and debris that may be carried into our waterways. These are the same waterways that provide habitat for fishes and other aquatic life, sources of drinking water, places to play, and pipelines to our estuaries and bays.
Anne Neale, a research ecologist in the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory, wants to ensure that the balance between things people want (e.g., convenient roadways and plentiful parking), and the functionality that the environment needs to maintain itself are understood and managed in a manner that is sustainable to both. The emphasis of Neale’s research is to provide information so that ecosystem services provided by the environment are considered in land-use decision-making.
Neale focuses on the interdependence between people, the environment, and ecosystem services. She is leading the Landscape Characterization and Mapping Team which is part of the EPA Ecosystem Services Research Program. The program is designed and conducted by EPA’s Office of Research and Development to improve our knowledge about how to protect and restore the services of nature. Developing a National Atlas of Ecosystem Services for the United States is Neale’s main focus.
The National Geographic Society,
one of the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations, is collaborating with EPA to build and provide tools that decision makers need to understand the impact of human activities on nature’s ability to provide and maintain ecosystem services. It is hoped the science and ecosystem services-based tools will help decision makers — from individual land owners to federal policy-makers — apply sound science and a clearer understanding of the impact of an action on ecosystem services. Clearly their collective goal is to avoid the unintended consequences caused by less-informed decision-making.
Neale admits, “This is an extremely challenging project and it’s very exciting to be working with the National Geographic Society. Simply stated, this collaborative effort combines EPA’s ability to develop the science necessary to quantify ecosystem services, with National Geographic’s world-renowned expertise at delivering information to the public in a way that generates interest and is easily understood.”
In 2009 the National Geographic Society, along with their partner Nature-Serve will launch LandScope America , a web-based tool designed to inform and inspire conservation. LandScope America will bring together an interactive collection of maps, data, photographs, videos, and stories, collected from a variety of sources, and will present them in a dynamic and accessible format. It will contain ecosystem service maps (e.g., important habitat and water pollution mitigation information) developed by Neale and the Ecosystem Services Research Program. The tool will allow users to build different ecosystem service maps and will allow them to zoom in to their area of interest to better understand the impact changes in land use will have on the services themselves. These richly-detailed maps will be displayable at multiple scales (e.g., national scales down to political boundaries) for the United States allowing decision makers to consider impacts beyond their own jurisdictions or natural boundaries.
The EPA and the National Geographic Society collaboration integrates many scientific disciplines to produce knowledge and tools to make smarter decisions in the face of changing human needs and changing landscapes. Human-induced change is inevitable and with these new tools and techniques perhaps making smarter decisions may also be inevitable.