SNRE Dean Rosina M. Bierbaum recently provided briefings to the top environmental staff members on Capitol Hill on a report that explores U.S. ecosystems and the social and economic value they provide.
Dean Bierbaum co-authored the much anticipated report titled "Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy." It was released July 22 and commissioned by President Obama through the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). PCAST then assembled a Working Group of its members to conduct a study to identify research priorities, the supporting informatics development and related institutional arrangements necessary for protecting biodiversity and managing ecosystems to ensure their long-term sustainability and security.
Dean Bierbaum served as co-chair of the Working Group with Barbara Schaal, both of whom are members of PCAST. Schaal is the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis and Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences.
The briefings occurred over two days and were designed to give House and Senate staff members a fuller understanding of the report's breadth, conclusions and recommendations. One of the briefings occurred in the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee room in the Russell Senate Building. Taking part (see photo above) were Dean Bierbaum (center); Dr. Barbara Schaal (left), who co-authored and co-chaired the report with Dean Bierbaum; and Dr. Meredith Lane, the project staff lead and staff analyst with the Office of Science and Technology Policy within the White House.
Before leaving for D.C., Dean Bierbaum spoke about the report during an interview.
Q: Good morning, Dean Bierbaum. Why did the President and his Science Advisor John Holdren want this report produced? Why is it significant?
Dean Bierbaum: I was honored to co-chair this report, the first update to a 1998 report that evaluated the federal effort to understand and use America’s living capital. (Editor’s note: That report was titled “Teaming with Life.”) Many more domestic and international reports on aspects of biodiversity and ecosystem sustainability have come out since. A lot has changed in terms of knowledge, technology and need. This is the first comprehensive update from the federal research perspective in 13 years.
Since the previous report, scientists have developed a much greater understanding of the many factors that are contributing to ecosystem degradation, now increasingly compounded by climate change. We know that pollution, habitat conversion, invasive species and over-exploitation have continued to imperil ecosystems. Climate change is already shifting the ideal range for many species, altering ecosystem composition and increasing the risk of extinction. We need to be able to predict how these composite changes will affect biodiversity, ecosystem health and ecosystems services.
Q: How did you pick the title: "Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy"?
Dean Bierbaum: We chose this title because environment, society and economics are inextricably linked: three legs of a stool supporting human well-being. A strong economy is dependent on the health of the environment, which determines the ability to produce monetizable goods such as crops. But a strong economy is also dependent on the sustainability of that environment over time which is NOT currently monetized and the ability of the environment to control the spread of disease vectors, to purify water through its wetlands, to pollinate forests and fields and to protect people from extreme events.
So, with growing economies and technologies, the production of what people will pay for has gone up, such as food, fiber, fuels and pharmaceuticals, which has led to increased degradation and over-exploitation of the environment and a decrease in its long-term sustainability.
Q: The government commissioned this report, so it has a role to play in managing ecosystems and environmental capital. But what exactly is that role?
Dean Bierbaum: There clearly is a role of government to remedy this in two key ways: first, to change the incentives structure, so currently unvalued ecosystem services are taken into account and brought into metrics; and second, to direct action, since the federal government has responsibility for managing, planning, restoring and preserving the land, water and the atmosphere directly through its agencies and their missions.
This report seeks to help the federal government use the information it already has more efficiently, develop critical missing information quickly and build a usable data infrastructure. In our report, we make a number of recommendations to the President that could enable agencies to better maintain sustainable ecosystems.
Q: Okay, let’s talk about the recommendations. What actions are called for?
Dean Bierbaum: The PCAST report that I co-chaired calls for a three-pronged effort at the federal level: make better use of existing knowledge, support the generation of essential new knowledge and expand the use of informatics.
We note there are a lot of good things under way that can and must be built on. For example, many agencies are currently managing federal lands with an “ecosystems” approach. Many agencies are trying to look for bigger conservation returns per dollar and many are trying to incorporate nascent efforts to value ecosystem services, whether it be things like carbon sequestration or water filtration. Those are all great.
But individual agency roles and mandates and data fragmentation doesn’t really allow for a comprehensive view across the government. So our recommendations across the report are imbued with this sense, this need, for integration of information, whether it’s across geographic regions, across federal agencies, or across disciplines that range from biodiversity to social sciences to economics.
Let me talk about two recommendations in more depth. Chapter 2 describes how ecosystem health and human health are interlinked and how degradation of ecosystems can lead to contamination of lands and waters—and shifts in disease agents. We suggest that the White House Council on Environmental Quality could consider requiring evaluation of health impacts from ecosystem changes under the National Environmental Protection Act process as part of the Environmental Impact statements. This would help us proactively think about, and then manage, human health and ecological health interactions.
Chapter 3 recommends that the President establish, by executive order, a regular and ongoing quadrennial ecosystem trends assessment, which we're calling QuEST, to use the data we have to provide policy-relevant information for wise planning and management of our lands and water, to identify if there are problems, and to make adjustments in how we manage and adapt to changes. QuEST should be closely integrated with the Congressionally-mandated Global Change assessment, now being updated.
Q: One of the specific recommendations centers on how the data collected by federal agencies and as part of federally-funded research can be better catalogued and shared. Tell us more about that.
Dean Bierbaum: Right now, despite efforts to create a repository in Data.gov, not all the data that come from these efforts is available let alone available in usable format. But if it were, both public and private sectors could use this information at local to national scales to plan for and manage their businesses, fisheries, farms and forests while cognizant of environmental change.
The report specifically recommends that the Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability should identify the most important data gaps within existing federal inventories and monitoring systems and clarify priorities, agency roles and funding to fill these gaps.
Our recommendations call for coordinated research on predictive models, fleshing out the data for those models, and then developing ways to incorporate socioeconomic data into ecological models and to incorporate them into decision-support tools.
Good decisions require good data. An informatics structure needs to be developed that can encompass all types of data from early museum collections to DNA sequences. The data need to be in a form accessible to both humans and machines. And data need to comply with standards that make them interoperable. Finally, data collected by federal agencies or research supported by federal agencies should be made openly available to the public.
Q: Don’t ecosystems by their very nature cross political boundaries? What international collaborations are required under the report’s recommendations?
Dean Bierbaum: We recommend that under the leadership of the State Department, and in coordination with the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the government should support the development of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This is a new effort just approved at the U.N. General Assembly in December. It is very important to do well and should build on national efforts. The next Plenary meeting will be in October in Nairobi, so the PCAST report is timely.
Q: What role do existing conservation investments play in the report?
Dean Bierbaum: We call for a better and more effective use of the conservation and ecosystem preservation investments that are already allocated. The current investment is actually significant. For example, the Farm Bill has about $6 billion alone to improve water quality, reduce soil erosion and protect wildlife.
Under an existing Executive Order (#13514), thinking about return on investment is already a priority but it is not yet applied to conservation programs. We believe conservation investments could be targeted—such as regionally where they make the most difference, as work by NOAA has suggested for combating hypoxia in the Gulf, or on ameliorating multiple problems at the same time, such as the broader benefits now sought by the Conservation Reserve Program of the USDA. There can no longer be a focus on single impacts, such erosion or water quality.
Q: Does the report call for any additional federal funding?
Dean Bierbaum: Now, the good news is we believe modest investments by the federal government, millions not billions of dollars, are needed. There’s a lot of ongoing good work that could be leveraged to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Some of the recommendations—improving "return on recurring investments"—such as via the Farm Bill, or better inter-agency coordination on attempts to characterize the values of ecosystem services, are essentially free. Others, such as creating a domestic assessment (QuEST), participating in the international IPBES and making all existing data available and usable, would require modest expenditures. We believe all of the recommendations could be implemented for about $50 million per year.
Q: How can people get the report?
Dean Bierbaum: The report is available now as a download from the PCAST website. That document contains the executive summary, all eight chapters, and various appendices.