Including people in the mitigation hierarchy: Mapping ecosystem service winners and losers in Colombia

Background/Question/Methods

Mitigation approaches are widely applied to compensate for environmental damages caused by human activities such as infrastructure development, mining and energy extraction. Classic mitigation programs focus on biodiversity or habitats. As such, offsets can be placed anywhere within a similar biogeographic range. However, most regulations that establish impact assessments and implementation of the mitigation hierarchy were designed, at least in part, to protect the provision of ecosystem services, the benefits people derive from nature. It is surprising, then, that the standard mitigation hierarchy does not explicitly include the flow of ecosystem services and the identity, location of, and impacts on people such regulations were, in part, designed to safeguard. In the United States, failure to include ecosystem services explicitly in impact assessments and mitigation requirements has led to Clean Water Act decisions that have unintentionally redistributed wetland services (e.g., fish for food, flood mitigation, etc.) away from urban poor to areas with significantly lower population densities. Here we extend the standard mitigation process to include spatially explicit mapping and modeling of ecosystems service flows, and consider the policy and social equity implications of this approach. 

Results/Conclusions

We developed the concept of “ecosystem servicesheds” for population centers in the Cesar Department, Colombia. These servicesheds identify the area within which mitigation actions will return the same benefits to the same people. We used a simple, multi-ecosystem service assessment tool, InVEST to estimate proposed mine permit impacts and to what extent mitigation through restoration activities, targeted in priority areas for corridors, can redress the nutrient cycling and erosion damages from possible coal mine expansion within each serviceshed.  We show that mitigation is unlikely to compensate for all ecosystem service impacts within most servicesheds, suggesting that regulations will need to be more prohibitive if negative effects are to be avoided. This case demonstrates the need for broader inclusion of ecosystem services in the mitigation hierarchy, with an explicit focus on beneficiaries.