Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

This presentation is brought to you by Arizona State Universities, Julie Ann Wrigley, Global Institute of Sustainability-- sustainability series. Speakers discuss a range of environmental, social, and economic topics.

Daniela Raik: So before I begin I'd like to just give a preview of what we've prepared for this session. And start by thanking Leah and all of the team here for organizing and hosting. We're really thrilled to be here with you for these two days and to have the opportunity to speak to this group this afternoon.

So I will start out with a brief overview of CI and then each of my colleagues here will talk a little bit about a particular area of work that each is engaged in. And then I'll make a few remarks that tie what we'll hear from each of them together. And then really we're hoping to leave some time for some questions and entertain a bit of discussion before the time is up. All right, so let me begin with this video to set the stage.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

I am the rain forest. I watched them grow up here. They'd left but they always come back. Yes, they always come back.

For my trees, their wood. My plants, their medicines. For my beauty, their escape.

I've always been there for them and I have been more than generous. Sometimes I gave it all to them. Now, gone forever.

But humans-- they're so smart, so smart. Such big brains and opposable thumbs. They know how to make things-- amazing things. Now why would they need an old forest like me anymore? Jungles, trees. Well, they do breathe air and I make air. Have they thought about that?

Humans-- so smart. They'll figure it out. Humans making air-- that'll be fun to watch.

Daniela Raik: So it's a series of 12 different films that we've produced with different celebrities narrating them that all have a similar message, which is around nature is speaking and we need to listen. So we heard from the forest. The other films are about the ocean, coral reef, and so on. If you want to check them out you can go to our website.

But I wanted to introduce this talk with this video because it's a campaign that we've launched around really what our core belief is, which is that people do need nature. And without nature, we're going to be nowhere. We need nature for food, for climate regulation, for water, for air, and a variety of other things. And we've structured our programs and our research all around this notion.

And not only do people need nature today, but well into the future. Earlier this afternoon we had a short meeting with President Crow and he made the point that we really need to think about sustainability as a multi-generational issue. And think way, way into the future when we're tackling problems, and making decisions, and considering the consequences of those decisions.

So with that, I will hand it off to my colleagues who will talk a little bit about different aspects of their work. And then I'll come back to wrap things up.

Rosimeiry Portela: Hello again. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. So I'm going to talk today about Accounting for Nature and the efforts that they-- the global community is taking over the last few years.

So just before a little bit, we've heard from Daniela and we've been talking all day that nature is the foundation for the prosperity of people and economies. We rely on forests to stabilize our climate. We rely on insects and pollinators to the food we eat-- the majority of food we eat. We rely on the water provided by rivers, lakes, and oceans and the fisheries that we depend upon.

But this information seldom really is taken by decision makers. And the impact that we make on nature is also often ignored. So what we really need is to use the systems that the government and business rely upon to make decisions and capture and integrate the values of nature into those systems.

Over the last 20 years, the scientific community has done an amazing, credible work on the nature of benefits in terms of ecosystem services. But they still remain what they are, largely a one off exercises that, with very few exceptions, really reach policy decision making both for business and in the public sector.

So let me start with the public sector. We have the System of National Accounts. This is going on for a very, very long time now. This is where we derive microeconomic indicators like GDP. And this is very comprehensive, it's systematic, and yet it's flexible. And it's used by countries. All countries in the world use the System of National Accounts.

Now what the System of National Accounts doesn't really deal with is with nature benefits. And over the last 20 years there has been a major push and a lot of work to work, how we can do that. And so recently, about three or four years ago, the United Nations System of Environmental Economic Accounting got the first standards for incorporating some of those primarily renewable and nonrenewable benefits into the System of National Account.

That's what we call a central framework. You're talking about minerals, we are talking about water, we are talking about timber. And it's a tremendous victory for all of us. But it's yet a very limited approach because once again, this only good-- looks into some of the stuff that we use that comes from nature. It doesn't really account for the ecosystem benefits nor for the ecosystem that they provide.

Let me give you an examples. Water, for example, is part of the center of framework. And the water that the industry uses, the water that households and different agriculture for irrigation purposes-- this is all taken into account into the central framework. Now what it doesn't take into account is where it comes from. Is it sustainable? Will we have this water over time? What's the role of the ecosystems regulating for this flow of benefits?

That's what we deal with in the context of experimental ecosystem accounting. Now it's experimental. We are really in the process of trying to figure out how we can really look into those benefits, and especially those very important regulating services that we've talked about for a long time and incorporate that into our accounts. There is importantly, here we're really looking to the areas of ecosystems-- where they are and the benefits, the overall condition in terms of their health, and the benefits they've provided.

And again we match these with a supplier stable. So we have basically the services that are not only provided, but used by different economic sectors and beneficiaries.

So a major breakthrough-- we are in the process of testing this. How do we do about piloting experimental ecosystem accounting?

Three years ago, funded by the Moore Foundation, we started this project in San Martin, Peru, which is the upper Amazon bays in the slopes off the Andes. A very interesting region in terms of biodiversity, very complex landscape of forests, swamps, wetlands, high gradient altitude in terms of from 300 meters to 5,000 meters above sea level, and also a very complex agricultural landscape, and a long history of deforestation in this region.

So working very closely with the government, we set ourselves to develop eight ecosystem accounts that covered all of the ecosystem classes in the state, which is about the size of Costa Rica-- 50,000 square kilometers. The condition of these ecosystems in terms of biodiversity, carbon, fragmentation, as well as the provision of numerous benefits including timber, firewood, water, sediment regulations, bushmeat, ecotourism, that we basically using different modeling approaches estimated those benefits as well as the monetary values associated with them.

So at the end of lots of very long tables, because accounting is a lot about tables, we estimated that the contribution of ecosystems as a sector, if you think of it together as agriculture, industry, hospitality, and-- all of the 32 economic sectors in the region, it represents the eighth economic sector contribute to about $58 million a year.

Now that's a very conservative estimate because we did really do just a subset of services. And the whole point was really try how this works. In any case, it really highlighted some very important issues that we weren't aware of.

For example, there is a wetland called Aguajales in the region that is really not-- we don't think much of it. And it's primarily cleared for rice paddies. Turns out, it provides the largest amount of benefits on a hectare basis-- this wetland.

And so now that we have the accounts, we are really working with the government number one, to institutionalize an approach so that the government makes clear roles and responsibilities moving forward-- whether they will scale this out to other regions or to the whole country hopefully and what kind of accounts will be prioritized-- really supporting the government on capacity building for the development of the accounts, and ultimately looking to the results of the accounts and really thinking about what are the analytical uses of the account? When you have an account, you have a number of macroeconomic indicators that you can certainly do-- use for numerous research purposes.

Right now we are looking, for example, into the sustainability of ecotourists within the region given deforestation rates. We are looking into transforming these rice paddies that were converted awhile ago into Aguajales, which is an important ecosystem in the region just to name a few. You know, looking into infrastructure projects, hydroelectricity. There are numerous policy applications that we are in the process of working with the government for them to identify.

Now, we will shift a little bit gears and talk about the private sector because here, the story is slightly different. When it comes to the public sector, I spoke about standards. I spoke about guidelines. It's very-- it has to be consistent with the system of national accounts. So it's somewhat rigid in some ways.

With the public sector, the Air Force is our-- different in a sense that they ought to be flexible. And there are numerous companies that already realize the importance of nature benefits and the impact they have on nature. And they see in this, in further assessing and understanding the magnitude of those benefits and impacts, as a way to really improve business of dealing-- better dealing with risks and opportunities.

So together with a number of organizations and led by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, we are working on the development of the Natural Capital Protocol, which is a stepwise approach for business to really understand and implement a natural capital assessment for their specific business given any sector, any geography, any scale. In parallel, two sector guides have been developed. And one is the food and beverage and the other is the apparel that follow the same structure and stepwise approach of the protocol, but really focus on specific issues associated with the sector in terms of materiality issues, for example, that are unique for either sector.

This has gone through an important consultation process and will be released in July 2016. Now, a number of people are working to the development of the protocol and I'd like to highlight the role of the business. These are the companies that have pilot the draft of the Natural Capital Protocol. The ones above the line we call them deep dives because they really test the whole protocol from step one to step 10. And the other companies, together with 50 others-- we can put everybody there-- have been testing different elements of the protocol.

So a lot of work. And before I move on, I just would like to say a quick note about what this kind of assessments require, both for public and of private sector. These are interdisciplinary approaches. They really require a lot of expertise. They require remote sensing specialties. They require spatial modelers. They require ecosystem services modelers. They require economists, statisticians, experts in business, experts in policy making.

So all coming together toward a common goal and building disciplinary bridges so they can clearly understand each other, communicate each other. This is a challenge for the way we train, for the most part, people. And we see that it's only when you really have this integrative kind of approach that we can come to a system solution to a system problem.

Olivio was a video developed by our partner and also partner of yours, the Business Council for Sustainable Development, that really makes a very articulate, an eloquent pitch. It's called Pitch for Nature on why we need business to incorporate nature benefits into their balance.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Hi, I'm John. I work for a company, a big company. I can't believe this still doesn't realize it relies on nature, which is why I'm organizing a meeting, a big meeting, to discuss natural capital. It's a new idea to boost our business.

You've heard of financial capital right. So what is natural capital? Well let's take company A. That's us. We make shoes, lots of shoes. So let's take a shoe.

This one's a leather. Leather comes from cows. To make a cow, you need grass and grain. That's a lot of land and a lot of water.

To make a shoe, you've got to have a soul. Do you think souls come from thin air? Get a grip. We need rubber and lots of it.

This rubber comes from rubber trees. Trees need land, soil, and water. We need aluminum for eyelets-- another natural resource. Let's keep moving.

We need energy, water, chemicals, dyes. Our shops need building, cooling, lighting, and heating. And when our shoes wear out, imagine this. Severe floods hit somewhere important in our supply chain. Likelihoods are lost. Our factories fail. Hashtag corporate nightmare.

But does it have to be that way? What if we replant forest to protect our sites from floods, or restore wetlands to filter water, or turn old shoes into something new? What if we realized that investing in natural infrastructure could save us cash too?

So back to my question. What is natural capital? It's all the value that nature provides for us-- the natural assets we have. If our company had to pay for our impact on nature, we'd owe $6 a pair. That's real money.

So ask yourself, what does nature provide for your business? And shouldn't it be on your balance sheets?

Jorge Ahumauda: So it's going to be hard to follow that video. My name is Jorge Ahumauda and I work at CI. And I lead this incredible network of sensors in tropical forests. And I'm going to be talking a little bit about how-- what some of the lessons we've learned from this network. And also, how does it fit into this whole mission of CI?

So I don't know if some of you can see that in that picture. There's, right there, there's a camera trap. Has anybody seen-- does anybody know here what a camera trap is? OK.

So we have camera traps all over the globe, about 1,000 of them now monitoring animals. And we started this about 15 years ago to fill the gaps in tropical forest knowledge that we had the time and we still have. So tropical forests, even though they're only like 5% or 6% of the area in the world, they have more than half of the biodiversity. But we don't really know anything about them.

So this project was created to start filling the gap. And we learned a lot of things from just monitoring animals and trying to understand what's happening and their role in the ecosystem functions-- in the ecosystem functions of tropical forests.

So one of the things that it's kind of-- we realized is that protected areas, which are the cornerstone of conservation, are-- we created protected areas. And CI has done this with many other organizations and governments. And then we kind of hope for the best. Right?

And actually, a study that was published a couple years ago showed that 50% of protected areas are not effective in tropical forests. This is a very daunting prospect. But when we looked at this study in particular, and similar studies have been done, we realized that most of the data that was coming from this study was opinion based. So people were being asked like what do you think is happening in a protected area? And people are saying oh, biodiversity is getting creamed.

And a lot of the motivation for that comes from protected area managers wanting more money for the protected areas. So it's-- the system is kind of rigged, was kind of rigged in trying to understand what is really happening in protected areas. And if we don't have the data, how are we going to know that?

And so we took that with a grain of salt. And we looked at-- there's other tools that are used to measure the effectiveness of protected areas. This is one that is used very commonly. We use it a lot. It's been adopted by the Mett.

We know the biodiversity program uses it too to assess their success.

And it's called the Mett Scorecard. And it has a lot of questions, but only five questions about biodiversity outcomes. And you guys being the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, you would think these would apply.

Well there are questions that are basically opinions or yes or no questions, right? So again, the Mett tool, which is the standard we use for measuring protected or effectiveness, only has five questions out of 670 which deal with biodiversity, which are yes/no questions. OK? Yeah. He shrugged over there. Exactly, I shrugged too.

And so we-- one of the things we used is that the data from this global network is-- to try to answer this question on a subset of protected areas that we studied for a few years. And this is what the TEAM network is about. The TEAM stands for tropical, ecology, assessment, and monitoring network. We put about 1,000 camera trap points in 16, 17 sites around the world. And we sampled for about five years or more in each of these places.

And what we found was starkingly different than what previous studies suggest. We have, first of all, not 50% of protected areas are being ineffective in terms of biodiversity outcomes. Actually, 20% of species are declining. Another 20% of species are increasing. Another 20% are stable. And then the remaining 40% are very rare species that we can't assess effectively.

So it's a very different picture from what we got previously. And also, we couldn't match anything related to whether species were increasing, decreasing, or stable to any of the six of these protected areas. So big or small, more isolated or less isolated, more money or less money, more hunted or less hunted.

So we're just beginning to understand how to measure protected effectiveness. But what is really clear is that we need data. We need data. If anything you remember from this talk, just remember that. We need data. And this network is one way to get at it.

And we're very excited to be in this partnership, this possible partnership, with ASU because we see there's a lot of interest in taking ideas like this and amplifying them and taking them to scale. So that's something very exciting for us.

We are moving in the direction of implementing this networks at a national scale. So actually having the whole protected area network of a country use camera trap monitoring or acoustic monitoring or some other form of monitoring where we get actual data from species that live in the forest, not just from looking at changes outside of the protected areas.

So that's all I wanted to share with you. And I feel honored to be here and speaking to you. Thank you very much.

Sandy Andelman: So continuing with this theme of measurement, which is really something that drives CI, we're very data driven. And in a way, it grew out of TEAM. So I'm trained as an ecologist. I've worked on wildlife. And what motivated me to start working on agriculture was really agriculture is arguably, maybe with the exception of climate change, the biggest threat to biodiversity.

But the conservation community has not really engaged very constructively with the agriculture community to try the influence how and where agriculture is practiced. And I've worked for over 30 years in Africa. And Africa has 2/3 of the world's arable land that's not currently cultivated.

And so it also has the last remaining big megafauna-- the charismatic megafauna. And so really I was motivated to start understanding agriculture and working with the agriculture community because I'm worried about losing these last places and some of the organisms that I and others at CI really care about.

And so one of the big questions of our time is really, how are we going to feed 9.6 billion people while sustaining nature? Because the reality is, if we don't sustain nature, we're not going to feed 9.6 billion people? And so we need to change the conversation from, do we feed 9.6 billion people or sustain biodiversity to how do we do both?

So CI together with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research created this program called Vital Signs to really measure both the value of nature for agricultural production and many dimensions of rural livelihoods. But then conversely, to understand what are some of the consequences, many of them unintended of different types of agricultural management and intensification for nature.

So this program Vital Signs, which is funded by the Gates Foundation and a number of other donors, really aims to build capacity initially in Africa in governments to both collect the data that is needed to manage socio aggro ecosystems-- rather than manage agricultural systems here, conservation systems here, poverty alleviation over here-- to manage it as a system. So to build the capacity to collect this kind of data and the much harder part frankly, is to transform that data into knowledge and tools that change policy, decisions, and behavior.

So this just shows you the countries where we're working currently in green and expanding to in the next one to two years. And then I just wanted to briefly touch on one of the outgrowths of Vital Signs, which came from a challenge. The Rockefeller Foundation said oh, this is-- the data are really interesting from Vital Signs. And there are a lot of questions that we can ask of this data that will inform our strategy. But we work in other places.

And so what-- how much could we learn to inform a more sustainable approach to agricultural development and to the resilience of food systems and rural livelihoods by integrating existing data. And so we created this Resilience Atlas, which is now about 15 terabytes of data. So everything on historic and current climate to future projections, land cover, agricultural production.

But also 1,000, actually probably over 100,000, household surveys done partly by the World Bank Living Standards Measurement survey-- so that under this tool we have about 15 terabytes of data that are fused, the biophysical and the economic, to really-- so that anyone but particularly governments can ask the question. So if I'm interested in a particular production system or livelihood or ecosystem in a particular place, what are the stressors and shocks affecting that system?

What's the extent of the stressor? So it could be, for example, climate variability are shocks. It could be conflict, flooding, market shock. So what's the extent and the severity? And then based on actual data and evidence, what are the kinds of assets and investments-- so natural capital as Meiry was talking about-- human, social, financial, manufactured capital that reduce the vulnerability of that system to that particular stressor or shock? And so essentially, underneath is all of this data. But what we have is kind of a data driven storytelling tool that guides people with maps and photos and stories through the data to get insights.

So if you go to this side, it looks like a bunch of slides. But actually, those are updating as the underlying data and analyses change. So this is just a quick overview of some of the kinds of data driven and integrative work that CI is doing. And I think there's-- we've barely begun to scratch the surface of the sorts of uses of these data to inform our work, as well as the work of others.

Jack Kittinger: All right, so we're going to jump in the water here. So this is an interesting experiment. If you go home and you go to Google, the greatest search engine ever, and type in oceans and do an image search. And if you image search oceans and bring up the top 100 images, 7% of them will have people in them. So the majority of the images that come up are these beautiful environments, big waves, big animals, blue seascapes, things of this nature.

And It occurred to me about two or three years ago to do this as an experiment. Because just talking to people about what I do, the majority of people, regular people in the street, view oceans as wilderness. I've been convinced of this. They don't view oceans the same way they view an agricultural landscape or even a protected area. They view them as wilderness that people have mucked up.

But in actuality, the way that we view these seascapes, is cultural seascapes in the same way that we view an agricultural system or a forest or a savanna as a place that's informed by people and by nature.

And our Oceans program has been around for more than a decade. We work in over 16 countries. We have a staff of about 150 that focuses on ocean and coastal ecosystem work, about 200 different partners globally.

Why should we care? Well, it's 98% of the living space on earth for one. It is-- it feeds three out of seven people. About almost half of the global population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast. So we are a coastal species. And it drives our economy-- $2.5 trillion in value that we derive from the ocean environment.

This is our kind of vision here. A healthy ocean that will deliver benefits to people now and to the future. So if you liked Kevin Spacey as the rain forest and you want to see an angrier version of an ecosystem, go see Harrison Ford as the ocean-- very compelling. I covered this planet. I can do it again, was one of the lines. So it gets your attention.

But our ocean program has been an incredible investment for CI. I want to lead off and tell you some of the achievements. We've secured more than $90 million in investment towards ocean conservation. We've helped create or protect over 200 marine protected areas, spanning 2.5 million hectares. We developed the seascapes model.

And this is one of our seascapes. This is in Indonesia in Raja Ampat in Western Papua. These are integrated governance systems where we protect critical habitats and ensure sustainable production from fisheries and ensure climate readiness.

We are leading initiatives around the globe on blue carbon to use sea grasses, mangrove, marshes, and choral reefs as carbon sequestrations just in the same way we do with forests on land. Because they actually sequester a ton of carbon.

And then lastly, we developed the ocean health index, which has got a global audience now. We're doing regional assessments in 25 different countries. It's been called the S&P 500 for the oceans. And it measures the range of benefits that a healthy ocean provides for 10 specific goals.

So our new ocean strategy-- and this isn't even up on our website yet-- boils down into three things. That if brought together in a place, help protect nature for the benefit of people. And it has three legs of the stool.

The first is natural capital protection. That is protecting and effectively managing seascapes. And it's not just about marine protected areas, which of course the terrestrial equivalent of those is reserves and parks and refuges.

But it also is about effective management.

So instead of just focusing on getting areas protected we're also looking at the areas outside of the protections. How do those function? As an example of that in Palau. Palau just set aside 80% of their marine domain in a marine protected area. And the thing that they administer of the new sanctuary office said to me, he said Jack, if the 20% that is not protected does not work, the 80% won't work. So you have to look at the outside seascape too. So it's not just about protected areas, but how the entire seascape works.

Sustainable production-- just as Sandy was saying with agriculture, we have got to ensure that seafood is produced in a sustainable way. Raise your hand if you eat seafood. Now raise your hand if you know where that comes from most of the time. Some of the time, right?

This is the least transparent of any of your food commodities in the marketplace, and the one that actually US consumers and European consumers have the most confusion about. So how do we ensure that small scale producers in industrial level aqua culture and fisheries are producing products that flow into a system that has accountability and traceability and is sourced sustainably?

And then thirdly, how do we solve the climate issue with ocean based solutions? So whether it's sea level rise or protection from coastal storms or things of that nature, that's a critical aspect of how we adapt to a changing climate.

We work, as I mentioned, globally. Most of our marine work with the exception of Madagascar, the northern Mozambique Channel, is in the Indo Pacific-- a little bit in the Atlantic coast of Brazil. I live here, so I'm right in the middle of it all which is kind of nice.

Let me tell you a couple of anecdotes about some of the programs that we work. In the Bird's Head seascape, down here in Indonesia, which is a little dark but it's down there. This is a tremendous area that we've had a 10 year investment in, largely supported by the Walton Family Foundation. And it's an amazing place.

It's in the most biodiverse place on earth for the oceans. More fish and invertebrate species occur there than any place on earth. It's about 3/4 of the size of Arizona to give you an idea of the size of it. It's a huge massive place.

And it's an interesting place because it's where the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean exchange a ton of water. So there's a huge amount of oceanographic mixing that occurs there. We've led a coalition to-- of partners together with other non-profits, the government, private sector, and so on, to create a 3.6 million hectare system of marine protected areas in this area. Absolutely incredible.

And just as Aria was saying with the terrestrial parks, it's finders establish those things. And that's really where the work begins. Because if you don't enforce them, then they don't matter. And so we've had tremendous investment on making them effectively manage an enforcement and things like that.

And now overfishing has decreased by 90%. The traditional tenure right holders in these areas, the Papuan communities, manage these places, are in charge of enforcement, and have benefited significantly from the biodiversity and the food security benefits of this.

Stable production-- our Brazil program and our Columbia program have done some incredible things with seafood, making market based linkages for small scale producers. Brazil has implemented a traceability system where the small producers in the Abrolhos seascape-- these are traditional fishers that live and work and extract fishery species from 20 extractive reserves up and down the coast. And they now provide a traceability solution on that seafood.

So the mangrove crab that they harvest carries with it a unique identifier. And when it's consumed in the provincial capitals, and in country capitals of Brazil, it carries that story with it. And those fishermen are benefiting from that.

Similarly in Colombia, the Columbia program has started this eco gourmet program. So they've linked these small scale producers to a major sushi restaurant chain in Bogota. And that was the first pilot. It worked incredibly well.

Fishers' incomes went up. The catch wasting went down because they did a lot of work on value chain improvement so there was less wasting of the catch. You get a ecological benefit, and economic benefit, and you link partners that actually care and have the same value sets.

And then lastly, on climate here in the Philippines-- the Philippines program has made a tremendous investment in the Verdi Island Passage, which is an incredibly biodiverse area. And in 2013 typhoon Haiyan went through the Philippines. Anybody remember hearing about typhoon Haiyan? Super typhoon-- we were looking up the wind speed-- 315 kilometers per hour. That's 200 mile an hour winds sustained.

It was devastating to the region. There were 1.5 million families affected, a million people out of their homes, incredible devastation. We've been working there to do mangrove restoration for many years. And the places where mangroves had been restored suffered less damage than the other places. So it's a nature based solution to that climate crisis. And that's a way to prepare communities to be resilient in the face of things like major storms.

So that's our Ocean program. Thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to the discussion.

This presentation is brought to you by Arizona State Universities, Julie Ann Wrigley, Global Institute of Sustainability for educational and non commercial use only.