22 Wetland Futures Report 2013: The Value of Healthy Wetlands
Implications of an ecosystem service agenda for wetland conservation
Dr. Richard Bradbury, Head of Environmental Research, RSPB
An important implication of our desire to embrace the
opportunities of an ecosystem services agenda is that we
run the risk of neglecting other, non-utilitarian reasons for
conservation. These arguments need to work together.
We also need to better value cultural services from
conservation – the direct benefits of our core conservation
product. For instance, the physical, and especially the
mental, health benefits of conservation are probably
huge. Progress is being made on understanding the
cultural benefits of access to nature, but how important
is biodiverse nature for these benefits? After all, nature
conservationists put much effort into encouraging
or sustaining more biodiversity within environmental
settings. This need to understand the service-biodiversity
relationship is not restricted to cultural services, which
is why it is a focus of the
Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Service Sustainability
programme.
Thinking beyond cultural services, there are clearly various
examples of where we can capitalise on the links between
wetland conservation and provision of, in particular,
regulating services. But we need to be mindful of some
pitfalls – ecosystem service arguments might not always
serve our conservation objectives in the way we might
hope, because of trade-offs in the delivery of different
services to different beneficiaries. Indeed, the elucidation
of these trade-offs is one of the key benefits of the
ecosystem service approach.
Even when biodiversity conservation does seem to
facilitate better ecosystem service provision, we must
be aware of some further issues if we want ecosystem
services to make a practical contribution to conservation.
What quality of evidence, and therefore what investment
in monitoring, is required to influence the relevant
decision-makers? What relative importance do we give to
market vs. legislative mechanisms? Can we engage the
right partners to turn ideas into practical reality? And, even
when the evidence and economics seems to stack up
in favour of an ecosystem service mechanism to reward
conservation, it still comes down to a negotiation between
important actors with understandable vested interests.
Climate change and wetlands
Dr. Mike Morecroft, Head of Profession, Climate Change, Natural England
The latest
report
of the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change
shows that the evidence for climate
change is stronger than ever. The impacts on biodiversity
in the UK are already becoming apparent
.
org.uk/resources/report-cards/biodiversity
), including
northward shifts in species distributions, earlier timing
of spring events and changes in communities and
habitats. Adaptation to these changing circumstances
is an important priority for conservation. Wetlands are
particularly vulnerable because of the importance of
the amount and timing of rainfall in determining their
characteristics.
The best available models of UK climate indicate that
rainfall patterns are likely to change, together with
increasing evapo-transpiration as a result of rising
temperatures and the possibility of more extreme drought
and flood events. Management of sites and catchments
offers the potential to protect wetlands, for example
through grip blocking, controlling water level, changing
the abstraction regime and influencing land management
in the catchment. In creating new wetlands it is also
important to determine what sort of habitat is likely to be
most sustainable in future.
To help in this adaptation process, a new
tool for
assessing the sensitivity of wetlands to climate
change
has been developed by the Centre for Ecology
and Hydrology for the Environment Agency and a
partnership of other organisations. This methodology can
be used at a number of levels of sophistication, but at
the most basic level a simple, on-line assessment can
be made on the basis of location, whether the wetland
is fed by rain, river or ground water and the broad
habitat type. Outputs are provided that are suitable for
assessing impacts of climate change on hydrology, bird
populations, vegetation and the historical environment.
The results are expressed in ways that allow the
uncertainty in climate models to be taken account of,
expressing potential changes in terms of probability.
Dr Richard Bradbury talking about win-wins at the conference
photo: Hannah Freeman
