• Energy Research

The paper builds around the key messages from the recently completed study — The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). The paper essentially attempts to map the problem encountered in up scaling the findings from site/local scale to national scale. First, the rationale for economic analysis of ecosystem services has been discussed and then the challenges in applying economics to ecosystems and biodiversity have been identified. The paper discusses the role of economic valuation, discounting and necessary indicator for it. Social and cultural context of economic valuation along with the nature of value articulating institutions have been highlighted. Most of these issues typically deal with ecosystem services at site and project level. The paper lays down the need for arriving at national policies from microlevel valuation work. The paper suggests that for national policy formulation and design, valuation and accounting of ecosystem services must be seen in the economy wide context where interdependence of sectors is the key. The paper shows the existing hiatus between this level of analysis of economics of ecosystems and the need for credible national level policies. An attempt has been made to highlight necessary steps to arrive at national level policies on ecosystems management.

A burgeoning population, pressing development needs and increasing household consumption are rapidly accelerating water use in direct and indirect ways. Increasingly, regions around the world face growing pressure on sustainable use of their water resources especially in arid and semi-arid regions, such as Northern China. The aim of this research is to obtain an overview of the cumulative water requirement for direct (domestic) water use and indirect water use for the basic food consumption of the households in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR), in order to reduce the pressure on grassland of Western China by encouraging sustainable water consumption. For indirect water use, we use VWC (virtual water content) analysis theory to analyze the total consumption package of 15 basic food types that were identified and quantified based on the household survey in 2011. In this survey, domestic water consumption data and food consumption data were collected from 209 representative households with spatial variation across three sub-regions (including meadow steppe in Hulun Buir, typical steppe in Xilin Gol, and semi-desert steppe in Ordos) and temporal variation from 1995 to 2010. The results show that the total amounts of food consumption per capita in three sub-regions all show an increasing trend, especially in Hulun Buir and Ordos. Compared to the direct water consumption, the indirect water consumption behind food production made up a major portion of total water consumption, which is affected (1) geographic locations (grassland types); (2) economic development levels and (3) grassland use policy measures. From 1995 to 2010, indirect water consumption displays a decreasing trend in Xilin Gol and Ordos due to the decrease of meat consumption and increase of fruit and vegetable consumption. When considering the amount of land per household, the grassland in Ordos still faces the great threat of high water consumption pressure. Such water consumption may affect water conservation services and productivity of grassland. Therefore, changing diet behavior and reducing the population can be considered options for sustainable use of water.

Management and restoration of mangrove forests to protect coasts are promoted in many countries, including Indonesia. Indonesian mangrove forests are actively restored and managed by local communities for their ecosystem services, including coastal protection. Whether community-based mangrove management (CBMM) is effective is still debated. Our study analysed the effectiveness of different CBMM practices in four Central Javan communities by analysing the capacity of their mangrove forests to protect against coastal hazards. We used complementary interviews, field assessments and literature reviews to collect the necessary information. The overall CBMM performance and success significantly differed for each community's mangrove rehabilitation effort and the resulting coastal protection service. Of the four communities, Bedono performed best in terms of mangrove coverage, forest structure and restored coastal protection service. This is explained by multiple factors, such as application of long-term and integrated CBMM approaches, involving appropriate maintenance and additional measures to reduce wave energy. Our results can help governments, practitioners and communities to better understand the factors that contribute to CBMM's success and failure when restoring and managing mangrove forests and protecting coasts.

There is a broad recognition that sustainable land management (SLM) is crucial for ensuring an adequate, long-term supply of food, raw materials and other services provided by the natural environment to the human society. This paper presents a methodological framework for analyzing the benefits of sustainable land management

Grassland degradation intensifies human-environment conflicts and adversely affects local residents’ livelihoods. To reduce grassland degradation in Inner Mongolia, China, the government has enforced (since 1998) a series of grassland conservation and management policies that restrict the use of grasslands. To ease the impact on the residents’ livelihoods, the national and regional governments have offered a series of top-down arrangements to stimulate sustainable use of the grasslands. Simultaneously, local households spontaneously developed bottom-up countermeasures. To determine the effects of these processes, we interviewed members of 135 households using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. We analyzed the effects on household dependence on local grasslands and on perceptions of the future of grassland use. Our findings show that the implementation of the grassland conservation policies significantly affected household livelihoods, which in turn affected household use of natural assets (primarily the land), their agricultural assets (farming and grazing activities) and their financial assets (income and consumption), resulting in fundamental transformation of their lifestyles. The households developed adaptation measures to account for the dependence of their livelihood on local ecosystems by initializing strategies, such as seeking off-farm work, leasing pasture land, increasing purchases of fodder for stall-fed animals and altering their diet and fuel consumption to compensate for their changing livelihoods.

Communities, nations, not-for-pro fi t groups, and some mining, infrastructure, and energy corporations are catching on to the fact that the ecological restoration of degraded ecosystems is vital to their search for sustainability and ecological accountability. The science of restoration ecology can provide the tools and major building blocks necessary to develop a transdisciplinary sustainability science and is a problem-solving toolkit used on the road to global, regional, national, and local sustainability. We discuss a landscape-scale restoration program for the large (155 km²) and heavily polluted Étang de Berre (Berre Lagoon) to illustrate these ideas. This lagoon is situated between Marseille, Salon-de-Provence, and Aix-en- Provence in southern France. We illustrate the use of (a) sequential references, which is a technique from the fi eld of restoration ecology that helps clarify goals and develop consensus among stakeholders and scientists of differing backgrounds; and (b) HMCA (historical multicriteria analysis), which is a variation of MCA that is often used in ecological and environmental economics. We show how to use a HMCA to synthesize ecological, social, and economic criteria across different historical time periods and be applied to a large scale, multifaceted project of this sort when a sequential reference exercise has been performed. Lastly, we note that ecological restoration is the key means for restoring natural capital (RNC) and to simultaneously recover and revitalize social capital. In the ecologically and economically beleaguered and vulnerable area as the one considered here, and indeed many others around the world, the road to sustainability passes through a portal of what we call “RNC thinking.”

Environmental Management, 44 (6) ISSN:0364-152X ISSN:1432-1009