Many times over the past few years I’ve referred to our land use and environmental work in terms of their improvements to health and livelihood of communities. We have never methodically developed indicators or measures of “healthy, sustainable livelihood”…but think it is critically important.

Attached is a white paper that begins to take the issues apart and structure some approaches.

This is enormously important to the future of carbon markets and conservation finance. Without measures of social well-being we are lost.

http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/bookshop/wp/wp72.pdf

The US Environmental Protection Agency has restructured their website. It’s oriented toward user groups…has redeveloped data sources toward practical uses…and thought innovatively about how to recast databases so that they might give meaningful environmental, political and economic insight (check out the zip code organized information on electricity generation, watershed conditions, etc.)

www.epa.gov

The 2008 Farm Bill provides for establishing science-based technical guidelines to measure environmental service benefits including carbon, water quality, and habitat credit trading. The Bill proposes creating a registry to collect, record, and maintain benefits.

Because of previous and ongoing research projects within USDA…Rapid Watershed Assessment, Conservation Effects Assessment Program, etc….there exists valuable science to lend to the assessment protocols for farm-based ecosystem services. Because of the ranking systems for the various conservation programs (EQIP, WHIP, etc.), the basis for the documentation to measure, register, monitor, and value these ecosystem services exist.

If USDA develops an outreach approach to development of the rules and guidelines…allowing for the protocols of measurement, registration and monitoring to coordinate with other standards that are developing -particularly for carbon credits- then they will have done a great service to farm and forest owners.

In 2003 the USDA began the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to quantify the environmental benefits from conservation practices on private lands. Andy Manale, a Senior Analyst at USEPA, has been working on the team and has spoken well of CEAPs work.

They have been working on a number of pilots that carefully quantify environmental effects from specific conservation practices. For more:

http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/technical/nri/ceap/index.html

CIG Project Summary

CIG Project Description

Last week I complained because we did not get a USDA Conservation Innovation Grant. USDA NRCS developed a program for Rapid Watershed Assessments – simple methodologies to assess conservation priorities and relate those priorities to the cost of the improvements. It offers a wonderful framework to incorporate ecosystem service evaluation, look at externalized costs, and develop methods to measure conservation improvements enabling farmers to incorporate other revenue streams from nutrient management, forest management, etc.

I’ve inserted above our Project Summary and Project Description. I want to find a source of funding to do this work. I believe NRCS staff wants, and would benefit from, these tools.

Getting the Water Right

Andy Manale (EPA) and I met after the Katoomba Meetings. During our discussion, we spoke about a number of the critical water supply and water quality issues confronting us….in the very near term. Attached is the announcement of a meeting taking place in Tucson late in July organized by the Soil and Water Conservation Society.

Part of the problem in understanding many of these water issues is the lack of hydrologic models and knowledge, particularly when it comes to incorporating climate change. The meeting will work on many of those issues.

Bring your 100+ weather gear…Arizona in July!

I just returned this morning from the 2008 Global Katoomba Meeting themed “Developing an Infrastructure Fund for the Planet”….felt a bit like Pat Coady who said to me after the meeting  “I have enough trouble trying to save 10 acres in our local land trust and now they want us to save the planet”.

It was a vast and daunting amount of information and opinion. John Holdren of the Woods Hole Research Center opened the meeting with an overview of the current science and economics. He’s a wonderful data presenter…and the news was bleak (I’ll put up his presentation when it becomes available). There were numerous insights both from his science and from other comments though the two days. For example, there are respected scientific analyst who see Lake Meade drying up before two decades….ironically I glance at the Soutwest Airline magazine on the flight to Providence and notice three enormous casino/resort development projects going up in Las Vegas…where have they been getting their environmental and economic advice?

Many of the significant early developers of carbon finance were present, and their thoughts were interesting…although the scale of the financing is troublingly large given the newness of the methodologies for credit creation, verification, and monitoring.

I spent a good bit of time collecting information on new efforts, pilots, and tool development….and tried to push folks along to provide more finance for those efforts.

As the presentations from the conference become available I’ll have more to say.

virginia-forestry-presentation 

An interesting presentation on forestry ecosystem services and a related tools development initiative.