If a global campaign to attach a cash value to what advocates and experts describe as "ecosystem services" becomes a reality in Trinidad and Tobago, dramatic changes in the manner in which national budgets are calculated may eventually become a reality. It's not all pie-in-the-sky. The Ministry of Planning and the Economy is actively considering it in the context of what the Ministry's Permanent Secretary, Arlene McComie, described at a recent environment workshop as "developing 'greener' national (financial) accounts that factor in the environmental consequences of economic growth."
The concept of "payment for ecosystem services" (PES) is not new. It essentially refers to a system under which landowners or its occupants are provided with an economic incentive for using their properties in a manner that leads to the provision of "ecosystem services".
Such services are defined in different ways by different people to include things such as fresh water, water and interventions that address the question of climate change including the maintenance of forests. The Green Fund is to be used to finance programmes under this heading and the Nariva Swamp Carbon Sequestration Project is one such example. Trinidad and Tobago coordinator of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) funded Project for Ecosystem Services (ProEcoServ), Prof. John Agard is a strong advocate. "Traditional approaches to conservation have not succeeded, we need to fashion an approach based on use and value to people," a University of the West Indies (UWI) press release quotes him as saying at a recent ProEcoServ workshop in Trinidad. "Here in Trinidad and Tobago we want to explore an innovative way of doing this through a scheme where we put a dollar value on the services that nature provides and the state purchases these services on behalf of the people," said Agard. The Department of Sustainable Development of the Organisation of American States (OAS) is also looking at "the contribution that legal and institutional frameworks may provide to strengthen this (PES) mechanism's effectiveness in areas such as land property, forests, biodiversity, water and fiscal law, among others."
Director of the OAS Department of Sustainable Development, Cletus Springer, told the Guardian "payment for Ecosystem Services is an idea whose time has come for the Caribbean." "While the practice has enjoyed growing success in many parts of Latin America and Africa," he said. "it has yet to take hold in the Caribbean." "Governments in particular will find that it offers a cheaper, more effective, more efficient and more participatory way of managing ecosystems of high economic, social and environmental value, such as watersheds, marine reserves and biodiversity corridors," Springer said. The PES approach, of course, has its detractors. One UK-based Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) emerging out of the Occupy London Stock Exchange movement, LSX Occupy, has for instance described it as a function of "disaster capitalism" – a term developed by Canadian author Naomi Klein to describe the exploitation of disaster and emergency situations to promote free market economic policies. A dissenting LSX Occupy dispatch has found its way onto the Rio +20 online portal ahead of the June 20-22 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
The group puts its argument against PES this way: "In UN conference-speak, the privatisation of the atmosphere is known as carbon trading, the privatisation of the world's forests is known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and the privatisation of everything else (is) known as 'payment for ecosystem services'." The scepticism is not all hippy-style street activism though. A 2009 paper on Payment for Ecosystem Services and the Challenge of Saving Nature written by environment and development scholars Kent Redford and William Adams raises questions about the PES approach. "There are risks to the current enthusiasm for the ecosystem services concept," the paper says, "Conservation has a history of placing great faith in new ideas and approaches that appear to offer dramatic solutions to humanity's chronic disregard for nature (e.g., sustainable development, community conservation, sustainable use, wilderness), only to become disillusioned with them a few years later. "The payment for ecosystem services framework fits this model disturbingly well."
So far, it has been a rocky road getting PES mainstreamed into national accounting systems globally. An international network of parliamentarians, Globe International - which lists Saint Lucia among participating countries in a forthcoming "World Summit of Legislators"- notes that despite 20 years of world summitry, countries are "not integrating the value of the environment into key economic decisions." "Since the original Earth Summit in Rio in 1992," the group says, "the level of political attention on the environment has risen while the state of the environment has continued to deteriorate."
It says its aim is to "define a targeted set of actions for legislators to ensure the value of natural capital is integrated into national accounts and economic policy making." The term "natural capital" is used by conservationists to describe the economic products of the natural environment. Speaking at the ProEcoServ workshop in Trinidad, Dartmouth College environmental studies professor, Richard Howart, said the "underlying narrative" of the ecosystem services discussion was that "ecological resources are a form of natural capital (and) a store of wealth that provides a flow of services over time."
He said in economic terms, conserving ecosystems and biodiversity involves a combination of "short-run opportunity costs" and "long-run, sustained benefits." Prof. Howart however cautioned that "evaluating such trade-offs involves complex issues of economics and both inter and intra-generational fairness." "Going beyond traditional approaches to conservation means bringing new partners to the table and having different types of conversations," said Professor Agard. "We need to speak in terms that people understand, like dollars and cents, and we need to talk to the planners and the finance people, and this is why it is significant that we are partnering with the Ministry of Planning and the Economy here in Trinidad and Tobago," he continued. According to Prof. Howart, systems of national accounts employed around the world appear to have "missing or invisible" information such as the depletion and degradation of natural capital in the form of minerals and forests; environmental degradation including pollution and loss of agricultural productivity and ecosystem services such as carbon storage, flood mitigation and pollination.
It is not expected that Finance Minister, Winston Dookeran's 2012-2013 budget statement will cite such factors, but the plan is to have these factors included sooner rather than later.