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Obstacles for the ecosystem service agenda development: perspectives from Central and Eastern European Countries

The concept of ecosystem services has dominated the agenda of socio-ecologic research over the past decade. Building on its scientific attractiveness, numerous institutional innovations have occurred worldwide: The Ecosystem Service Partnership (www.es-partnership.org) has been established in 2008; the specific journal called Ecosystem Services has been founded in 2012; phase II of TEEB reports has directed the attention towards the evaluation of ecosystem services, etc. In 2012, under the umbrella of United Nations the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services – IPBES (http://www.ipbes.net) has been launched in order to support synergies among scientists, policy makers and the NGO sector regarding the biodiversity protection and the ecosystem service assessment.

As many changes have been going on, it seems that several Central and Eastern European Countries (further referred as CEECs) are missing their trains of the ecosystem service agenda development. They are two principal reasons for this situation that I would like to refer to: political and scientific, both related to each other. Primarily, I will share experiences from the Czech Republic, but similar features can be found elsewhere.

Political and bureaucratic backwardness: The problem of the political support might be illustrated on the case of IPBES reflection by the Czech Ministry of the Environment. The Czech Republic was not a founding member of IPBES. In summer 2013, Czech scientists encouraged by their colleagues from abroad joined the IPBES Eastern European consultation meeting in Hungary. They were asked to inform the Czech environmental ministry about the need to nominate official representatives in order to raise their voices (and votes) during IPBES plenary sessions, specifically the 2nd Plenary Session in December 2013. After a few months of email forwarding, one scientist was able to reach the “responsible” officer and got the pronouncement that the Czech Republic is carefully mapping IPBES activities, however, it will not join it, yet. It might reevaluate this decision during 2014 when having more specific information about the institutional arrangement, financing and the program. In March 2014, the ministry sent out a note asking for scientific opinions why to join IPBES and it got comprehensive arguments supporting the accession from the academia. Currently (September 2014), the Czech Republic has not become a member, yet, and there is no information about further progress.

This case represents the extreme approach of the political ignorance of the development of the international agenda and the bureaucratic backwardness in the situation when officers are strongly dependent on the unstable political will. Further, biodiversity loss is not considered as the crucial environmental issue (in comparison to e. g. air pollution). Also biodiversity protection efforts are often undermined (“man is less than a beetle”) and conservation is presented as an obstacle for economic development in public debates. The ecosystem service concept with its follow-up regulation proposals has not been fully understood nor reflected.

Regarding reflections on IPBES, there are quite big differences among particular CEECs. Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia became members, with Hungary being very active in the Eastern European scale. Poland and Bulgaria have not yet become members.

Scientific issues: The political environment as described above has large consequences for national research priorities. The national demand for mapping and assessing ecosystem services does not exist – the territory of CEECs is sometimes viewed as a “black hole” regarding the accessibility of complex data. This situation exists despite of the fact that there are research teams in particular states successfully cooperating in international research project consortia. These teams, however, are lacking capacities (mostly financial) to undertake the comprehensive monitoring and assessment of ecosystem services for an entire country.

Since the ecosystem service concept is inherently interdisciplinary, the cooperation of social and natural scientists brings large synergies regarding the research outcomes and novel regulation proposals. Unfortunately, according to my experience this cooperation is rather week in CEECs. Traditional prejudices are still vital (e.g. “economics is just about money”, “ecology is just about species”) and block the formation of stronger networks within particular countries. Because scientists tend to fight against each other and, after all, they are poor lobbyists, the ecosystem service agenda development is waiting for more enlightened or for more systematically working politicians or bureaucrats … or stronger international pressure in the future might be another option to simply move things forward.

Hot topic: New perspectives on agricultural ecosystem services?

by Gaël Plumecocq

In January 2014, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) released a report on how ecosystem services have been dealt with in scientific papers (Tancoigne et al. 2014). Two main statements are drawn from this report. First, agricultural ecosystem services (or agro-ecosystems) are largely overlooked in scientific papers, in particular when compared to other fields, even though it is widely acknowledged that agriculture provides and is supported by ecosystem services. Second, very few scientific articles are dealing with more than one ecosystem service. From these two assessments, the INRA is currently launching a meta-program aiming at (i) modeling and understanding the ways in which several agro-ecosystems are functioning together, (ii) measuring, mapping, and assessing these services; (iii) managing the social compromises resulting from trade-offs between services, and (iv) supporting decision-making and stakeholders' strategies.

To my view, jointly analyzing several agro-ecosystems as the meta-program encourages us to do, is essential. This research strategy may reinforce analysis conducted in the field of Ecological Economics. The adoption of the meta-program also indicates the significance this leading agricultural research institute is granting to the theme of ecosystem services, by making its priority public for this line of research, dedicating resources at the scale of the institute, and committing itself in the long-run (the meta-program will last 8 years). Moreover, to some extent the meta-program strategy is challenging the mainstream economic approach of ecosystem services to which Ecological Economics contributed in publishing numerous monetary valuation studies, in a context where this mainstream approach keeps being dominant. For example, Costanza et al. (2014) reasserted the usefulness of monetary valuation in an update of Costanza's 1997 Nature paper; and among all the reports published by the TEEB initiative, the conclusions and recommendations almost exclusively drew attention to monetary results of the experience (TEEB, 2010). Yet, monetary based approaches to ecosystem services tend to disembed and compartmentalize ecosystems that are always related to or included in other ecosystems or sociosystems. The solutions and recommendations that are offered then rely on a segmented and fragmented vision of the problem. Providing alternative approaches to ecosystems functioning – and in particular to agro-ecosystems – as a system and the services they provide, seems then urgent.

Two examples of research I am involved in can inform on how focusing on more than one agricultural ecosystem service can renew ecosystem services analyses.

The LEGITIMES project (http://www6.inra.fr/legitimes/) aims at analyzing and unlocking the farming of legumes in France. These plants are providing a significant service for farmers (and society) by fixing the nitrogen from the air in the soil (supporting service). Therefore, they help reducing the use of chemical fertilizers (regulating service). Such cultures are currently underused in crop rotations, and from many years, research and development were under-invested as regard to main crop (such as wheat and corn). Highlighting the hidden monetary value these plants could provide can be misleading and conceal more fundamental factors explaining why legumes are not being used in crop rotations. Understanding the lock-in factors of the legumes production then requires highlighting the diverse perceptions actors hold on the various services (type, intensity, possibilities of trade-offs or persisting antagonisms...), or disservices legumes are providing them.
Another project I am working on, studies the implementation of a landscape charter in the Banyuls region (French Catalunya). In this mountain area, the wine production is made possible by terrace farming. A unique landscape then ensued from the farming of grape wine, providing aesthetic amenities and therefore cultural ecosystem services for inhabitants as well as tourists. Nowadays organic farmers are damaging terraces by manually scratching soil in order to eliminate self-propagating weed (maintaining supporting services), while conventional farmers who use chemical fertilizers and herbicides are preserving the aesthetic quality of the landscape (cultural services). In this case, why the former would agree to financially compensate the latter for producing aesthetic and patrimonial value? Trade-off between supporting and cultural services (preserving natural resources such as water or soil, or preserving the quality of the landscape) then requires understanding why these actors are acting the way they do, as well as the landscape's attributes they seek to value.

These two examples illustrate how alternative approaches to monetary valuation of agro-ecosystem services – but this can also concern ecosystem services in general – can renew our perspectives, and help providing more effective solutions to overuse of resources and environmental pollutions. To a certain extent, monetary valuation can be useful to draw public opinion to a particular issue. But it fails to provide operational solutions to environmental issues. Rather, we should, as intended by the INRA meta-program, focus on non-monetary conception and value of ecosystem services. Questions that would follow from this perspective are not only: What is the hidden value of services provided for farmers, for the agro-industry or the whole society? Who is providing it? Who is benefiting from it? And possibly, how should the provider be financially compensated? But also: How do the perceptions of the (dis-)services provided shape the behaviors of actors from the agro-sector? What are the cognitive devices and social institutions (norms and social values, routines and habits, decision-making procedures, individual and collective strategies, power structures...) that improve or impair ecosystem functions? Which ones? From which point of view? Etc. This perspective should help building a conceptual and interdisciplinary framework that would enable us to tackle more precisely the complexity and – maybe the specificity – of agricultural ecosystem services by addressing synergies, conflicts, and trade-offs between these services. Building this framework is not currently on the agenda of the meta-program, and constitutes in my opinion a strategic entry for an Ecological Economics contribution.

Costanza R., de Groot R., Sutton P., van der Ploeg S., Anderson S. J., Kubiszewski I., Farber S., Turner R. K., 2014, Changes in the global value of ecosystem services, Global Environmental Change, Volume 26, p.152-158.

Tancoigne É., Barbier M., Cointet J.-P., Richard G., 2014. Les services écosystémiques dans la littérature scientifique : démarche d’exploration et résultats d’analyse. Rapport d’étude pour la phase d’exploration du métaprogramme EcoServ. INRA, 69 p. Available only in French at https://colloque.inra.fr/lancementecoserv/content/download/295/3058/version/1/file/Bibliometrie_EcoServ_v6-2.pdf

TEEB, 2010. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature: A Synthesis of the Approach, Conclusions and Recommendations of TEEB, October 2010, http://www.unep.org/pdf/LinkClick.pdf

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