Civil infrastructure will be essential to face the interlinked existential threats of climate change and rising resource demands while ensuring a livable Anthropocene for all. However, conventional infrastructure planning largely neglects the ...
Recent high-profile efforts have called for integrating ecosystem-service values into important societal decisions, but there are few demonstrations of this approach in practice. We quantified ecosystem-service values to help the largest private landowner in Hawaii, Kamehameha Schools, design a land-use development plan that balances multiple private and public values on its North Shore land holdings (Island of O’ahu) of ∼10,600 ha. We used the InVEST software tool to evaluate the environmental and financial implications of seven planning scenarios encompassing contrasting land-use combinations including biofuel feedstocks, food crops, forestry, livestock, and residential development. All scenarios had positive financial return relative to the status quo of negative return. However, tradeoffs existed between carbon storage and water quality as well as between environmental improvement and financial return. Based on this analysis and community input, Kamehameha Schools is implementing a plan to support diversified agriculture and forestry. This plan generates a positive financial return ($10.9 million) and improved carbon storage (0.5% increase relative to status quo) with negative relative effects on water quality (15.4% increase in potential nitrogen export relative to status quo). The effects on water quality could be mitigated partially (reduced to a 4.9% increase in potential nitrogen export) by establishing vegetation buffers on agricultural fields. This plan contributes to policy goals for climate change mitigation, food security, and diversifying rural economic opportunities. More broadly, our approach illustrates how information can help guide local land-use decisions that involve tradeoffs between private and public interests.
Gross domestic product (GDP) summarizes a vast amount of economic information in a single monetary metric that is widely used by decision makers around the world. However, GDP fails to capture fully the contributions of nature to economic activity and human well-being. To address this critical omission, we develop a measure of gross ecosystem product (GEP) that summarizes the value of ecosystem services in a single monetary metric. We illustrate the measurement of GEP through an application to the Chinese province of Qinghai, showing that the approach is tractable using available data. Known as the “water tower of Asia,” Qinghai is the source of the Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, and indeed, we find that water-related ecosystem services make up nearly two-thirds of the value of GEP for Qinghai. Importantly most of these benefits accrue downstream. In Qinghai, GEP was greater than GDP in 2000 and three-fourths as large as GDP in 2015 as its market economy grew. Large-scale investment in restoration resulted in improvements in the flows of ecosystem services measured in GEP (127.5%) over this period. Going forward, China is using GEP in decision making in multiple ways, as part of a transformation to inclusive, green growth. This includes investing in conservation of ecosystem assets to secure provision of ecosystem services through transregional compensation payments.
Globally, most restoration efforts focus on re-creating the physical structure (flora or physical features) of a target ecosystem with the assumption that other ecosystem components will follow. Here we investigate that assumption by documenting biogeographical patterns in an important invertebrate taxon, the parasitoid wasp family Ichneumonidae, in a recently reforested Hawaiian landscape. Specifically, we test the influence of (1) planting configurations (corridors versus patches), (2) vegetation age, (3) distance from mature native forest, (4) surrounding tree cover, and (5) plant community composition on ichneumonid richness, abundance, and composition. We sampled over 7,000 wasps, 96.5% of which were not native to Hawai'i. We found greater relative richness and abundance of ichneumonids, and substantially different communities, in restored areas compared to mature forest and abandoned pasturelands. Non-native ichneumonids drive these differences; restored areas and native forest did not differ in native ichneumonid abundance. Among restored areas, ichneumonid communities did not differ by planting age or configuration. As tree cover increased within 120 m of a sampling point, ichneumonid community composition increasingly resembled that found in native forest. Similarly, native ichneumonid abundance increased with proximity to native forest. Our results suggest that restoration plantings, if situated near target forest ecosystems and in areas with higher local tree cover, can facilitate restoration of native fauna even in a highly invaded system.
Human needs are increasingly in jeopardy due to food production. The expansion of food production has cost permanent loss of top soil (24 billion tons/year). In spite of hugh gains made in food production the number of hungry people has increased. Social political and economic constraints determine the extent to which food resources reach those in need. Underlying the constraints are inequities in land ownership frequent choice of low nutrition and perishable foods unequal access to inputs and farm credit limited availability of jobs inequalities in the food market and continuing political neglect. The following issues are discussed: 1) nutritional security maldistribution and absolute shortages; 2) the loss of productivity from the sea; 3) constraints on food production; 4) the need for more suitable farmland; 5) soil depletion; 6) the loss of biodiversity; 7) the loss of genetic diversity; 8) the need reordering of priorities on use of fertilizers irrigation and pesticides; 9) the prospects for expanding food production through genetic engineering reducing postharvest losses and diverting feed to food; and 10) the environmental constraints on increasing food production (air pollution global warming and the population-environment-food interaction). Understanding of agricultural systems and ecology is given as the reason that the American agricultural community and political leaders remain so detached. University training of agronomists has been deficient in providing adequate contact with ecological science in contrast to pure biology. Revelle did not include the possibility that global change may reduce productivity. Optimism is based on blind assumptions that present market systems will effectively respond to environmental deterioration. Nathan Keyfitz has rightly isolated a key empirically backed point of knowledge: that bad politics are widespread and persistent. In order to achieve a theoretically biophysical limit of food production natural capital will irreversibly be depleted and a high standard of living will be compromised. Slowly evolving trends are difficult to see. Social changes are needed to control population invest in agricultural sectors of developing countries reorganize the world trade system for food reduce maldistribution of food and alleviate poverty. 10 billion people much less 5 billion people cannot be nourished even temporarily without these changes.
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