Category Archives: Journal club

Nagoya COP10 outcomes

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For Friday the 12th of November we had a bit of a special issue in our weekly journal club. Many of us had been somewhat following what was going on in Nagoya CDB COP10 meeting that took place in Nagoya, Japan between 18th and 29th of October. Following the over all failure of global 2010 targets it is, after all, very interesting to see what the global high-ranking political community has in mind for the next decade.

Since none of us in our little club was high-ranking enough to have actually been in Nagoya, we had to settle for the Advance Unedited Texts from the meeting website. These documents listing several important outcomes of the meeting have no doubt passed through many delegates and represent a compromise everybody is happy with. It is no surprise then that we didn’t find the documents very easy to digest. Right after the meeting both international as national (Finnish) media praised the success of the meeting, but at least the press releases said very little about what was actually achieved. After reading some of the documents we knew a little more, but not a lot. As expected, the outcomes are more of declaration than an action plan, although important targets are listed as well. Since there are no binding obligations it is left up to national implementation to actually meet the targets and it that sense we still have to wait and see how the implementation takes off. Needles to say, after the 2010 failure at least our journal club wasn’t overly optimistic about meeting the targets.

Nevertheless, several important targets are listed. Few of these attracted more discussion, like target 1

By 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably

which is perhaps the most important target of them all, but at the same time a bit funny: how can the other targets be met if this as a starting point won’t take place until the end of the target period? Target 5 states that

By 2020, the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests, is at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero, and degradation and fragmentation is significantly reduced

Clearly the wordings are more careful than 10 years ago, in other words instead of speaking about stopping we are talking about halving and reducing. Perhaps the most interesting target is the target 11 which gives us some concrete numbers

By 2020, at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water, and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are conserved through effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and integrated into the wider landscape and seascapes

This sounds all very good – or at least better than the current situation – but still much is left to how one actually calculates the statistics. For example, in Finland the proportion of protected forests and areas under restricted forestry use is 14.5% of the total land area, which is not that far off from the target. However, if we consider strictly protected forests on actual forest land the number drops to 5.2%. Also it remains to be seen how “equitably managed”, “ecologically representative” and “well connected” systems of protected areas are implemented in reality. The upside is that considering these targets, there is clear need for conservation planning in the coming years 🙂

There has been a clear sea-change in the way how the motivation of biodiversity conservation is presented. Ecosystem services and especially TEEB are very pervasive in the documents, which pretty much reflects what is going on in the world of conservation today. If you can’t appeal to people’s heart, appeal to their wallet.

Further into our discussion we also agreed that human population growth is almost nowhere to be found in any of the texts. Economic growth and it’s harmful effects are lightly discussed, but there is no mention about the detrimental effects that ever growing human population has on the environment and biodiversity. The reason might be that it still is too touchy a subject especially for some of the developing countries. On the other hand, at least from the perspective of resource consumption it is the excessive standard of living in the developed world that is causing a big strain on the environment.

In the end we felt that perhaps it is still a bit early to call the verdict on Nagoya as so much depends on how the “flexible framework” is utilized and implemented in different parts of the world. At least the meeting wasn’t as immediate failure as Copenhagen climate negotiations were, but already very critical views have been published concerning the outcome of COP10. We’ll definitely keep an eye on how things are progressing.

Wade et al. (2008): Ecological restoration of farmland: progress and prospects

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On 8th October 2010 we discussed a review article by Wade et al. (2008) on farmland ecological restoration. The authors suggest that ecological restoration projects may become necessary in farmlands in the course of the continuing expansion of agricultural production, in order to secure the functioning of related ecosystem services in the future. The authors also discuss where, when and how ecological restoration projects have been, and could be, implemented. The article was a useful read to at least some of us, since we were so well familiar with the topic, even though changes in agriculture could have a remarkable influence on biodiversity conservation.

The major issue that raised discussion in the journal club was that the role given to biodiversity in the article: the authors assessed the value of biodiversity and the threat of its depletion mainly as how biodiversity benefits the human society via ecosystem services. We recognize the term ‘ecosystem services’ as today’s buzzword, with much of the ‘buzz’ focusing on the quantification of the monetary value of ecosystem services. While we can see the benefit of approximating the scale of human economic benefit from the existence of natural ecosystems, we raised several concerns over this quantification trend from the perspective of species conservation:

  1. It is important to keep in mind that restoring ecosystems by using ecosystem services as indicators of success does not necessarily have much to do with the conservation of native biodiversity. This is exemplified by the authors of this article, as they present cases where ecosystem functions have been enhanced along with the ecological fitting of exotic species, and while they state that “relatively large increases in ecosystem function may be achieved with low or modest levels of biodiversity enhancement”.
  2. Studying ecosystems as sets of measurable, categorised services may blur our perception on how complex natural ecosystems are, and how difficult it may be to accomplish a systemic change in ecosystem function that would be truly stable in the long run.
  3. Giving simple price tags to ecosystem services easily hides the subjectivity of the underlying quantifications. Is there just one way to measure, for instance, the monetary value of pollination to the human society?

While the article focused heavily on ecosystem services, its views on how ecosystem restoration projects support species conservation goals became unclear. The authors stated that there is no worldwide compendium of species that have been targeted in farmland ecological restoration programmes. Species of native ecosystems that have been displaced by agriculture were mentioned as potential targets, but the species known to be dependent on traditional agricultural landscapes were mostly bypassed. The overall goal of “restoring ecosystem ‘health’“ did not quite fit together with the artificiality of examples where, for instance, forest-dwelling insects were supported in agricultural landscapes with added coarse woody debris.

The lack of well-founded conservation goals makes it difficult to evaluate which restoration methods would make sense from conservation point of view. For instance, if the Earth’s land surface area required by agriculture is indeed going to rise to 60 %, some species would probably benefit from it consisting of patchy landscapes full of corridors, edges and nodes, as the authors suggest. But many species of native ecosystems might also suffer from such means of restoration, as they would rather benefit from agricultural landscapes being as compact as possible, which would leave the maximum possible space for continuous, natural ecosystems elsewhere.

Nevertheless, there is a great need for an exchange of views between agro-economics and conservation biology. This very comprehensive, cross-disciplinary article was a welcome element to that discussion.

Link to the paper:

Wade M, Gurr G & Wratten S (2008): Ecological restoration of farmland: progress and prospects. — Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363:831-847.

Juutinen et al. (2008): Cost-effective forest conservation and criteria for potential conservation targets: a Finnish case study

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This article was very different from our other read articles. The viewpoint of it was more commercial forestry than ecology or biodiversity of which we have often been used to. And as we found out this article was part of Biodiversity and Monitoring program in Finland (MOSSE) it was interesting to see what else is there.

General observation was that biodiversity and ecology aspects were quite well forgotten even though we thought that this article would contain them. We were surprised as well that the content seemed to ignore the enormous literature, research work and case studies of different spatial analysis tools and techniques and their use. The article was written in very detailed way so that many of us thought it was too long. The obverse is that for example the materials, which are the same that are used in many similar studies, were explained so that everyone know now where they came from. Even the article was long it left a questions unanswered in cases such How did they really count the habitat index, why don’t they discuss the ratio between patch quality and size, what really is the budget etc.. The variables comes from commercial forestry and in this article it’s very poorly or not at all described that they have an impact on quality as well, not only to productivity.

Main message of the paper seemed to be that there’s no need to conserve the “best” places (for example with richest biodiversity) because if we choose less good they will eventually become better and in the end the result will be the same. The writers don’t mention anything about where the species which are now living in the best places would stay waiting for time to do its magic in these less good areas.

The second message is that according to their modeling there’s not enough good quality forests left in the survey area and therefore the target boundary could be set lower to
1. be able to achieve target (for example to conserve 10% of the area)
2. save money because bigger areas could be chosen and the bigger the area is the cheaper the conservation is per unit in this case.

For us – people working with mainly in “conservation science” world – the article was an awakening experience about other perspectives in conservation, preservation and the value of biodiversity among other policymakers and scientists.

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Journal Club 11.6.2010.

Cost-effective forest conservation and criteria for potential conservation targets: a Finnish case study: Juutinen, A., Lugue, S., Mönkkönen, M., Vainikainen, N., Tomppo, E.

Environmental Science & Policy
Volume 11, Issue 7, November 2008, Pages 613-626

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VP6-4SWG0NT-1&_user=949111&_coverDate=11%2F30%2F2008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1370206143&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000049116&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=949111&md5=b418672bbd4ba14c146c118d2fb1a2da