Lweis--Burke Associates LLC - August 3, 2011

On July 22, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report, entitled, “Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy.” The report updates a PCAST report from 1998 under President Clinton that called for investment in and understanding of our nation’s “living capital.” However, this latest PCAST update focuses on potential solutions to the loss of environmental capital witnessed in the United States since the first report in 1998 and emphasizes the economic benefits that can be attained by protecting our environmental capital.
 

Highlights from the report include:
 

Increased funding of current federal conservation and restoration activities would improve the impact of those activities. However, PCAST suggests re-targeting existing programs at current levels by prioritizing those programs that are the most cost effective. Federal agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of the Interior (DOI), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), should do a better job of developing valuations of ecosystem services.

Data gaps existing in both regional monitoring systems for biodiversity and gaps within existing biodiversity inventories should be identified and a strategy to fill these gaps should be created.Federal agencies should clarify their priorities, roles, and funding for filling these gaps.
 

The report begins by recognizing that the American economy relies heavily on ecosystem services, perhaps much more than is understood. These services include the formation of soil and pollination of plants in order to grow crops and feed the American people, management of fresh water to support our livelihood as well as commercial and industrial endeavors, and other various natural contributions that help keep Earth’s climate system in check. However, the report states that increases in human activities are degrading our ecosystems and the services with which they provide us. At the heart of this problem are a number of pressures, such as increasing population, a growth in affluence, and environmentally disruptive practices and technologies that are used to meet ever-growing material demands.
 

In order to combat this mounting problem, PCAST recommends the federal government improve the management of ecosystems under its control, such as the National Parks, and incentivize private actors in order to lower their environmental impact. To accomplish this, the report makes the following six overarching recommendations:
 

1. Federal agencies that implement biodiversity and ecosystem conservation programs should prioritize expenditures based on cost efficiency.
Currently, federal agencies collectively spend $10 billion annually on conservation and restoration activities, including $6 billion under the Farm Bill to improve water quality and up to $900 million under the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Although increased funding would improve the impact of these programs, more careful targeting at current levels could achieve greater results. Therefore, federal agencies with ecosystem conservation and biodiversity
programs should prioritize based on cost efficiency. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) should aid in this process.
 

2. Federal agencies with responsibilities relating to ecosystems and their services (e.g., NOAA, DOI, USDA) should improve their capabilities to develop valuations for the ecosystem services affected by their decision-making and should factor the results into analyses that inform their major planning and management decisions.
The science of valuing ecosystems is inexact, but is improving. Ecosystem service valuation at various agencies will need to be expanded. Furthermore, activities on both public and private lands that impact ecosystems and their services need to be better understood. CEQ, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should work together to ensure methodologies and best practices are developed across the agencies in a collaborative manner. Furthermore, funding levels should be increased for federally funded research and at federal agencies for in-depth sampling and inventory of critically important groups of organisms.
 

3. The U.S. government should institute and fund a Quadrennial Ecosystems Services Trends (QuEST) Assessment.
QuEST should provide an all-encompassing and integrated assessment of ecosystems in the United States. It should include trend predictions in ecosystem change, a synthesis of societally relevant ecosystem services and challenges to the sustainability of those ecosystem services, as well as policy recommendations. QuEST should be conducted and coordinated closely with the National Climate Assessment, which is produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and was established under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, and it should build upon existing monitoring, assessment, and species-discovery efforts.
 

4. The U.S. Department of State, in coordination with OSTP, should take a leading role in the development of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
IPBES is an international effort to assess global biosphere change. The United States’ contribution to IPBES should be based upon QuEST and oversight of this activity could be given to the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Committee on International Science, Engineering, and Technology, the Sustainability Task Force of the NSTC’s Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability (CENRS), or a working group created between CENRS and the U.S. Department of State.
 

5. CENRS should identify the most important gaps within existing biodiversity inventories and federal and regional ecological monitoring systems, and clarify priorities, agency roles, and funding for filling these gaps.
CEQ, OSTP, and NSTC should facilitate cross-agency collaboration in ecosystem monitoring in order to improve upon the information currently available. Recommendations are needed to integrate existing monitoring networks via state-of-the-art informatics. Additionally, the annual OMB-OSTP memo could call out these gaps in biodiversity as a priority for future funding.
 

6. NSTC should establish an Ecoinformatics-based Open Resources and Machine Accessibility (EcoINFORMA) initiative.
Current data and knowledge would be integrated and used in order to maximize federal savings and to better inform decision making. EcoINFORMA should incorporate not only ecosystems data but also geophysical and socio-economic data, which are needed to support ecosystem valuation. EcoINFORMA data should be published in machine-readable and interoperable forms to encourage research engagement by academia, public and private entities, and other stakeholders.
 

In addition to the above recommendations, the report notes there are 55 national environmental monitoring programs, the majority of which have not posted their data to www.data.gov. Complicating data collection further, many of the federal agencies overseeing the monitoring programs have excessively strict security which makes it difficult for the data to be accessed by policy makers.
 

The full report can be downloaded at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast_sustaining_environmental_capital_report.pdf.