Ecosystem services blog posts

If tomorrow, all of East Africa’s wetlands disappeared, what costs would governments incur? While it is nearly impossible to place a quantitative value on wetlands, a new project is exploring methods of valuation of wetlands in the Nile Basin.

In the face of climate change managing water resources is becoming more difficult. In an effort to manage increased water variability, there is a competing discourse on the need for more built infrastructure (e.g. dams, canals and levees) to store and regulate water in order to support social and economic development and facilitate adaptation to climate change.

We’d like to present you with a summary of what’s been in scientific and popular literature this month on the theme of Ecosystem Services and Resilience.

Just one week before World Wetlands Day, at a meeting in Myanmar, Environment Ministers of the Greater Mekong Subregion reaffirmed their commitment to “green” economic growth. The challenge they recognized is ensuring not only sustainable growth but also inclusive and shared growth.

Science on the Pulse: what is the best way to navigate through the mountain of publications that emerged from 2014 to find the gems that should absolutely be on your reading list? For those looking to brush up on their knowledge on ecosystem services and resilience, we're sharing the top ten reads as identified by a polling of the ESR Working Group.

What do you do with a landscape when it has been overwhelmed by a tsunami? When the coastline is altered beyond recognition, the paddy fields filled with salt, the trees flattened, the villages washed away and the population decimated?

The WLE Focal Region Writeshop process was distinctive in that it turned the focus on identifying research outcomes as the basis for designing research. In each writeshop we challenged researchers to think beyond traditional research approaches. Instead of starting with a research output at they assumed would be useful in the region, we reversed the process.

Over the last two decades, “ecosystem services” have taken center stage in the field of conservation as a way of emphasizing that protecting nature should be about sustaining and enhancing the benefits nature provides to people. But how do we do this in practice and achieve both conservation and development goals? Can WLE rise to the challenge?

We are all searching for ‘innovation’. It seems to be bandied about in every meeting and in every project proposal. WLE is in the process of designing and facilitating a series of workshops across four focal regions to foster innovation at the regional level.

Working with fellow ecologists and Friends of the Earth’s Big Ideas project, I have been exploring the way in which natural systems function as living organisms. How we might best use this understanding when it comes to producing food? And what role could technology play?

Big dams have been taking a something of a pounding in recent weeks. A recent article in the New York Times by Scudder, an expert on dams and poverty alleviation, concluded that such behemoths were rarely worth the cost.