SYMP 21-1
Putting ecosystem services impact mitigation into planning and policy: Examples from The Nature Conservancy
Major investments in infrastructure to support a growing population and economic development are projected to occur in the coming decades. How this infrastructure is developed will have a substantial impact on regional and global trajectories for biodiversity and ecosystem services. In this talk, I will focus on two mechanisms through which The Nature Conservancy and partners are working to demonstrate and mainstream models for using nature-based solutions to meet human infrastructure needs alongside conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services. The first mechanism is water funds, in which investors such as bottling companies and water utilities pool financial and other resources to support improved watershed stewardship practices by upstream land managers to protect source water areas and deliver other environmental and social co-benefits. The second mechanism is integrating ecosystem services into the mitigation hierarchy (avoid, minimize, restore, offset) to complement more advanced approaches for biodiversity impact mitigation. Across both mechanisms, I will discuss the underlying theory of change, successes and challenges for demonstrating the effectiveness of these approaches, enabling conditions for implementation, and possible pathways for replicating and scaling up successful models.
Results/Conclusions
Water funds and the mitigation hierarchy provide two strategies for creating institutional structures to better manage ecosystem services and to advance a norm of social-ecological responsibility. Importantly, both approaches focus planning and policy discussions at a landscape-scale, providing an opportunity to proactively balance conservation and development objectives important to diverse stakeholders. Cultural and intangible values are recognized as important yet remain largely underrepresented in project-scale implementation, highlighting the importance of continuing to advance methods for operationalizing these values in ecosystem services strategies.