Wednesday, 13 January 2010 - 15.30pm - 17.00pm
Speaker: Heather Tallis
Abstract
Biodiversity and ecosystem service discussions are absent from all major types of natural resource decisions, barring those around climate change. In most cases, the main problem is not a lack of theoretical or conceptual understanding of the issues. Few ecosystem service assessment approaches exist that can be applied in diverse political, social and ecological settings to give consistent, defensible answers to management questions. InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) is a suite of models that has been developed to fill this gap. While most applications of the ecosystem service concept have focused on carbon in the context of climate programs, there are several other emerging opportunities to include ecosystem services in policy.
I will give three case examples highlighting the flexibility of InVEST and the diverse kinds of decisions that are starting to recognize and incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services. I will show change in biodiversity and several ecosystem services under scenarios of development and climate change in the Willamette Basin, Oregon (USA). A case study in the Cauca Valley, Colombia, will demonstrate the use of InVEST for prioritizing conservation investments made by the Water For Life water fund—next steps in this application will help investors reduce their risk under climate change. Finally, I will show how InVEST is being used to prioritize the allocation of mining permits and target mitigation investments in the Cesar Department, Colombia.