Trees clean our air and forests and wetlands filter our water. Nature’s water ecosystems stabilise the climate, prevent flooding and control the quality of water. All of these can be thought of as services provided by T&T’s natural capital—our stock of water, land, air, and renewable and non-renewable resources (such as plant and animal species, forests, and minerals).
And just as all forms of capital are capable of providing a flow of goods and services, components of natural capital interact to provide humans and other species with goods and services that are wide-ranging and diverse.
Ecosystem services are imperative for survival and well-being. They are also the basis for all economic activity. The services that nature provides for free are often not accounted for and, therefore, not properly valued by decision-makers. This is the first of a two-part report on a recent workshop in T&T which looked at these issues. Part 2 follows tomorrow.
“The management of biodiversity and related ecosystem services here in this country continues to be challenging. Destruction of important ecosystems, overhunting of game and protected species, unplanned physical development and pollution are some of the direct drivers of change affecting our ecosystems and the services they provide,” noted Vidiah Ramkhelawan, permanent secretary in the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources.
But on the plus side, we may finally be taking the environment more seriously, as recent pilot projects in the Buccoo Reef, the Eastern Northern Range, and the Nariva Swamp are yielding results that point the way to more informed policymaking.
Ramkhelawan was speaking earlier this month at the final T&T workshop of a global pilot project—the Project for Ecosystem Services or ProEcoServ—to measure the value of ecosystem services, with the goal of integrating environmental values into a better system for resource management and decision-making.
It’s a first for T&T, which has never had such a system, and often embarks on development projects without a full understanding of the costs or risks to our environment and its ecosystems. So we may, for example, kill off a wetland area to build a strip mall, and then suffer from periodic—and costly—flooding later on; or we may raze a whole mountainside forest ecosystem to get aggregate to build roads, only to suffer from more costly flooding, erosion, landslides, and destruction later on, not to mention the loss of animal and plant life.
“Before we had the evidence, much of what we were doing was based on speculation, or sometimes weak empirical evidence. This kind of research will certainly help to strengthen our policy framework, and our collective programme of action,” Ramkhelawan said of the kind of research generated by ProEcoServ.
What is ProEcoServ?
ProEcoServ is seeking to integrate biodiversity and ecosystem considerations into sectors of development planning which have not traditionally given much attention to them, said Ramkhelawan. In T&T we mainly have just spatial planning and physical planning, she noted. ProEcoServ has introduced the idea of useful support tools to help mainstream ecosystem services in planning: these include natural capital accounting, strategic environmental assessments, payments for ecosystems services, and ecosystems services valuation.
ProEcoServ is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and implemented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The GEF, established in 1991 by the World Bank, is the largest public funder of projects to improve the global environment. The T&T component of ProEcoServ is being led by the Department of Life Sciences, University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine Campus with technical support from The Cropper Foundation.
The July workshop was organised by ProEcoServ TT in partnership with the RDI Caroni Swamp Project, and hosted as a collaborative effort between UNEP, the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources in T&T, and UWI. Ramkhelawan called ProEcoServ a landmark initiative, as it has tried to break new ground in ecosystem services, science and applications.
So what, exactly, are ecosystem services? In T&T, our wetlands, forests and coral reefs have tremendous value because they provide food, clean and plentiful water, wood and craft materials, and medicinal plants. They also provide less obvious services like pollination, reducing flooding, regulating the climate, protecting our coastlines, and helping to offset the effects of man-made climate change. We also use them for many recreational activities—like beach or river limes and forest hikes.
These benefits of nature, or ecosystem services as they are called, are the link between the environment and development. The ability of our ecosystems to provide these critical services decreases if they are destroyed or used so heavily that the ecosystems cannot function properly, according to the ProEcoServ website.
“Research has established that as a small island state, the protection of our natural heritage is what will play a central role in helping to sustain human wellbeing well into the future; and it is something that we cannot ignore or sideline—certainly not for much longer,” said Ramkhelawan at the workshop’s launch on July 1 at the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business, to a packed audience of scientists and representatives from government ministries, civil society groups, and other organisations.