As fiscal budgets for land and resource conservation are tightening, the USDA's Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets (OESM) is gearing up to develop strategies that will increase and diversify funding sources for land management by linking economic markets with ecological systems, reports the Wildlife Management Institute.
Formed in the waning weeks of the Bush administration, the OESM has spent the past several months refining its mission outlined in Section 2709 of the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 to "establish technical guidelines that outline science based methods to measure the environmental services benefits from conservation and land management activities in order to facilitate the participation of farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners in emerging environmental services markets." According to Sally Collins, Director of the OESM and former Associate Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, the new office has been focusing on creating technical and scientific standards that will open opportunities for economic markets to develop around multiple ecosystem services provided by naturally functioning lands. Initially, the OESM will explore ways to expand markets for carbon sequestration through carbon-offset trading, a topic of growing interest in national and international policy circles.

Until fairly recently, the concept of ecosystem services has remained generally abstract to much of the natural resources management community. However, increasing awareness of the potential effects of climate change on ecosystems and their functions has spawned a renewed appreciation of the biological and supporting services (timber production, water and air purification, pollination, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, etc.) that ecosystems provide to human and wildlife communities.

Historically viewed as "free benefits" to human industry and agriculture, these services generally have not been captured and valued by traditional markets. Thus, landowners have not received monetary compensation for the services their land and management practices provide to human welfare and industry. Collins and the OESM intend to change that: "We want to find creative ways to make payments for ecosystem services relevant and accessible to land owners. We need to identify how markets for ecosystem services can be integrated into and complement existing programs, such as the Farm Bill, conservation banking, wetlands mitigation banking and many others that provide incentives for conservation-based land management. Capitalizing on existing partnerships, networks and programs is a good way to rationalize ecosystem services markets and make them work for the landowner."

While many have heralded the OESM as evidence of a "massive realignment in the management of natural resources" on the part of the federal government, others note that the OESM's key challenge will be to avoid a focus on developing carbon offset markets at the expense of the broader goal of establishing guidelines for a wide array of ecosystem markets. Developing carbon markets is only one piece of the puzzle," said Dr. Joshua Goldstein, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Dimension of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. "Carbon markets should help pave the way to deliver broader ecological benefits and payments if we are careful to align them with other ecosystem services programs."

Goldstein and others point out that the real promise of diverse markets for ecosystem services is their ability to be "layered" (multiple payments for multiple services) into conservation-payment programs, ultimately providing a robust funding source for land and resource management that is less sensitive to fluctuations in any one market.

Collins agrees and adds that a foundation of scientific knowledge is key to increasing the diversity of these markets: "Getting the science right is critical to all of these potential ecosystem service payment programs. Our office is really focused on using and promoting science that demonstrates ecosystem services benefits within a host of land-management practices."

The information, guidelines and tools developed by the OESM to identify ecosystem services markets will support the work of the federal Conservation and Land Management Environmental Services Board, a federal interdepartmental coalition charged with assisting the Secretary of Agriculture assess environmental service benefits of conservation and land management.

USDA officials and conservationists alike have high hopes that the policies and science-based models put forth by the OESM and Environmental Services Board will increase landowner participation in land conservation by aligning private buyers for ecosystem services on private lands rather than depending on limited public funds to incentivize better land use-practices.

"Integrating ecosystem services into North American conservation is an exciting prospect," commented Goldstein. "Organizations like the OESM and others have a unique opportunity to create financial solutions that don't seek to re-slice the pie of conservation funding, but instead, make the pieces bigger." (mcd)