Ecological Footprint: a measure of the demand populations and activities place on the biosphere in a given year, given the prevailing technology and resource management of that year.

Biocapacity: a measure of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area available to provide the ecosystem services that humanity consumes – our ecological budget or nature’s regenerative capacity.

Human well-being requires, in part, the material consumption of provisioning services provided by the ecosystem. The figure below provides an overview of the biodiversity supported ecosystem services that improve human wellbeing. The biocapacity indicator within the National Footprint Accounts quantifies some of the flows within the provisioning services, including food, fiber, and timber. Land explicitly set aside to uptake carbon dioxide emissions could also be measured within the National Footprint

Which are the six assumptions to assess the “ecological footprint”?

1. It is possible to keep track of most of the resources humanity consumes and the wastes humanity generates. 2. Most of these resource and waste flows can be measured. 3. By weighting each area in proportion to its usable biomass productivity, the different areas can be expressed in standardized hectares. 4. Because these areas stand for mutually exclusive uses, and each global hectare represents the same amount of usable biomass production for a given year, they can be added up to a total representing the aggregate human demand. 5. Nature’s supply of ecological services can also be expressed in global hectares of biologically productive space. 6. Area demand can exceed area supply. For example, a forest harvested at twice its regeneration rate appears in our accounts at twice its area. This phenomenon is called ‘‘ecological overshoot’’.

Global ecological demand over time, in global hectares

Ecological Footprint (EF)

C = consumptionP= productionI = imported commodity

flowsE = exported commodity

flows

Ecological Footprint Atlas 2010

Demand for product

National yield of P

Ecological Footprint of Production

Ecological Footprint Atlas 2010

Conversion to units of global hectares

p

Biocapacity (BC)

Area available for a given land use type

Yield factor = ratio of national to world average yields

• Captures difference between local and world average productivity within a given land use type

Equivalency factor = weights area supplied or demanded of a specific land use type into global hectares

• Captures the relative productivity of a and use type

Ecological Footprint Atlas 2010

Biocapacity (BC)Area available for a given land use type

(i) growing crops for food, animal feed, fiber, oil, and rubber. (ii) grazing animals for meat, hides, wool, and milk. (iii) harvesting timber for wood, fiber, and fuel. (iv) marine and freshwater fishing. (v) accommodating infrastructure for housing, transportation, industrial production, and hydro-electric power. (vi) burning fossil fuel.

Impact Components

How do these Impacts aggregate?

How do we measure the “overshoot”?

The extent to which human area exceeds nature’s supply. It’s a percentage.

Time trend of humanity’s ecological demand.

It doesn’t say anything about how rapidly the natural capital stock is becoming depleted or for how long.

How are these Impacts buffered?

Which are the factors that lead to ecosystem stability?

RESILIENCE and BIODIVERSITY

By Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier

Everything is connected

What do the authors mean by “saving the world’s biodiversity for its own sake”?

Why conservation for its own sake is failing?

Save the Panda

Earlier conservation campaigns had centered on charismatic species such as pandas, whalesand seals.

Biodiveristy hotspots

Factoid 1: By 2007, 30% of people in USA heard about “biodiversity”.

Biodiversity hot spots clearly are not galvanizing the public to fund or participate in conservation.

What’s Diversity?

Number of species present in community– In an entire food web– In a ‘guild’ or set of species thought to compete for same things (or a

‘trophospecies’?)

Sampling problems – Rare species

• Indexes• Rarefaction• Unbiased estimators

– Cryptic species• Hard to see, catch, etc…

– Molecular ‘bar-tagging’• Actual ‘cryptic species’, hard to tell apart from related species

– Molecular tools– How prevalent?

» E.g. ‘Hyallela azteca’

Adapted from Mathew Leibold, Ecology class

How to design a conservation program? Which principles should guide it?

Conservation is a Service Paradigm

What is the idea of ecosystem services strategy?

Conservation is a tale of two strategies

What was the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment?A project that documented the impacts that humans have had on ecosystem services in the last 50 years before 2003. This assessment found that most ecosystem services not only have declined but are being used unsustainably.

How were the Ecological Services divided?

1) Provisioning (supplying products such as food or genetic resources).2) Regulating (contributing regulatory functions such as flood control).3) Cultural (supplying nonmaterial benefits such as a sense of spiritual well-being).4) Supporting (providing basic elements of the ecosystem, such as soil formation).

Disaster brings into sharp focus the relation between ecosystems and human living conditions for the wider

public.

Mangroves and Marshes are Tsunami Bioshields

What is the “Life Raft” strategy?

Conservationists should generally seek to identify life raft ecosystems.

Areas with high rates of poverty, where a large portion of the economy depends on natural systems and where ecosystem services are severely degraded.

Conservation efforts aimed at providing clean water, reducing soil erosion and preventing overfishing will help people and protect much, though certainly not all, biological diversity.

A case of study

What are the major shifts to better conservationism according to the authors?

Ecosystem services are a repackaging of traditional conservation ideas that emphasize interconnectedness.

1) Change your mind:• Pristine wilderness doesn’t exist anymore.• One quarter of a million people join the planet every day. • More forests and wetlands will be cleared for agriculture.• Ocean species will be fished to depletion. • Biodiversity is going to decline.

2) Conservationists should focus on regions where the degradation of ecosystem services most severely threatens the well-being of people.• By mapping habitats in terms of their ability to protect human communities in

addition to their biodiversity, participants are finding important areas to preserve.

3) Conservationists should collaborate more closely with development experts.• Investmenting in clean, sediment-free water is often the same as investing in

protecting aquatic biodiversity.

Why some people gets concerned about this proposed conservation strategy?

1) Services provided by nature do not always correlate with biodiversity.2) Plants and animals most central to ecosystem services and human economy

tend to be fairly abundant.

What do you think about this statement?

“But rare species still have a crucial role: as insurance. With global climate disruption and massive modification of land, the species of today may become the abundant species of tomorrow, and so we should save as many as possible.

In California, the nonnative European honeybee is the most important pollinator from an economic perspective. If the European honeybee population were to become dramatically reduced (and it has recently been threatened by introduced mites), some of the less abundant native bees might increase and fill the vital economic role of crop pollinators”.

Human-caused extinctions are inevitable

What’s the take home message?Conservation will only become truly global and widely supported when people are central to its mission.

http://myfootprint.org

Spring 2014 Spring 2013