Wildlife and our fabulous natural world underpins so much of our lives – RSPB’s Head of Environmental Research, Dr Richard Bradbury, describes how those benefits can be measured.
Protected areas and other wildlife rich sites often provide significant benefits to people, such as protection from flooding, provision of clean water and climate regulation. Some of these so-called ‘ecosystem services’, like spiritual, health and aesthetic value are huge but hard to quantify. Others are more tangible, yet even so their value is rarely considered in land-use decisions, for example, to log a forest or to drain a wetland for agricultural production. Demonstrating these values often carries weight with decision makers, in support of more traditional arguments for conservation, and can lead to better-informed decisions that support biodiversity conservation.
There are few tools for ecosystem service assessment, and those that exist often require substantial resources or specialist knowledge. To tackle this, BirdLife International, Cambridge, Southampton and Anglia Ruskin Universities, the RSPB and the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre are among 15 institutions that have developed an innovative approach to valuing ecosystem services: The Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment (TESSA). An overview of TESSA has been published in the journal Ecosystem Services, including examples of its early application at sites from wetlands in the UK to mountain forests in Nepal and the UK overseas territory of Montserrat [1].
TESSA guides non-specialists through a selection of accessible, low-cost methods, to identify the ecosystem services that are important at a site, and evaluate the benefits that people get from them now, compared with those expected under alternative land-uses. TESSA also recommends how the results can be communicated, both to decision-makers and to local stakeholders. Importantly, TESSA enables users to indicate who will be the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ as a result of any change in the state of the site and ecosystem service delivery. TESSA has already been downloaded by people from over 40 countries, including researchers, non-governmental organisations, students and government employees.
All too often, the critical value of natural, or indeed restored sites, is not considered in land use decisions. We hope that TESSA will provide an important means to take into account the crucial role of nature in delivering human wellbeing and sustainable livelihoods.
Here’s what Jenny Birch, BirdLife International’s Ecosystem Services Officer, has to say about the project.
“Users of TESSA around the world have shown the critical role that local people can play in generating locally relevant data on ecosystem services, to inform management options at particular sites. In each of our test sites, trade-offs have been revealed, and these have provided insights into the actions required to achieve biodiversity conservation, while ensuring fair and equitable distribution of costs and benefits to people.”
The collaboration to develop TESSA has been supported by the UK government's Darwin Initiative, Axa Research Fund, and in particular the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund for Conservation and Arcadia.
Available here, TESSA currently covers five classes of service: global climate regulation, water-related services, harvested wild goods, cultivated goods and nature-based recreation. Funding permitting, development will continue, with new modules on pollination, cultural services and coastal protection in preparation, and the release of a web-enabled version is planned.
[1] K.S.-H. Peh et al. TESSA: A toolkit for rapid assessment of ecosystem services at sites of biodiversity conservation importance Ecosystem Services 5 (2013) e51–e57