Presentations given during the conference are now available for download
Tuesday, 24. August 2010
See Documents –> Presentations
‘Salzau Message’ on Sustaining Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital
Thursday, 29. July 2010
The human population of earth is likely to increase to 9 billion people by the end of the century, the global climate is being transformed, biodiversity loss continues, and conventional, fossil-based economies are no longer a viable option. Business as usual is a utopian fantasy. If we are to improve the sustainable well-being of humanity, we need to sustain and restore ecosystem services and natural capital. Stakes are high. The potential for irreversible, negative, outcomes is alarming, and a precautionary approach to decision-making should therefore be adopted.
We, the undersigned, believe that solutions to providing a sustainable and desirable future require broad recognition of the basic facts about ecosystem services and natural capital, and advances in two key areas: (1) integrated measurement, modeling, valuation and decision science; (2) adaptive management and new institutions, including the new Ecosystem Services Partnership discussed below.
Basic Facts about Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital
In recent decades, a shared understanding has emerged about ecosystem services and natural capital, including:
• Ecosystem services (ES) are the contributions of ecosystem structure and function – in combination with other inputs – to human well-being.
• ES, and the natural capital assets that produce them, represent a significant contribution to sustainable human well-being, a contribution that is increasingly being recognized.
• Ecosystems, ecosystem functioning, and ES are being threatened and degraded by human activities, and the situation will be exacerbated by climate change and biodiversity loss. At the same time, knowledge about how to steward and restore ecosystems is rapidly growing.
• An ES approach helps to identify and quantify the ecological and socio-economic trade-offs and synergies on which decision-making should be based.
• Many ecosystem services cannot (or should not) be privately owned. Therefore, they are for the most part ignored by conventional markets.
• Many ES are such that providing benefits to one person does not reduce the amount of benefits available for others. They are “non-rival” and “non-excludable”. They are therefore best treated as “public goods”.
• While tremendous progress has been made in improving our understanding of how ecosystems function and how humans benefit from them, there will remain enormous uncertainties about how ES are provided, the magnitude of their benefits, and how human activities affect their provision.
• Adaptive management is a useful approach that allows one to learn from the system dynamics and manage under this uncertainty.
1. Integrated Measurement, Modeling, Valuation and Decision Science in Support of Ecosystem Services:
The scientific community needs to continue to develop better methods to measure, monitor, map, model, and value ecosystem services at multiple scales. Moreover, this information must be provided to decision makers in an appropriate, transparent, and viable way, to clearly identify differences in outcomes among choices. At the same time, we cannot wait for high levels of certainty and precision to act. We must synergistically continue the process of improvement of measurements with evolving institutions and approaches that can effectively utilize these measurements.
a. Trade-offs
Ecological conflicts arise from two sources: (1) scarcity and restrictions in the amount of ES that can be provided and (2) the distribution of the costs and benefits of the provisioning of the ES. ES science makes trade-offs explicit and, thus, facilitates management and planning discourse. It enables stakeholders to make sound value judgments. ES science thus generates relevant social-ecological knowledge for stakeholders and policy decision makers and sets of planning options that can help resolve social conflicts.
b. Accounting and Assessment
Accounting looks at the flow of processes or materials and is relatively objective, while assessment evaluates a system or process with a goal in mind and is more normative. Both are integrating frameworks that have distinctive roles. Both ecosystem service accounting and assessment need to be established and pursued in a broader socio-ecological context. We also need to balance expert and local knowledge across scales.
c. Modeling
We need modeling to synthesize and quantify our understanding of ES and to understand dynamic, spatially explicit trade-offs as part of the larger socio-ecological systems. Further participatory development of integrated, dynamic, spatially explicit models that include ES are needed. These models can incorporate and aid accounting and assessment exercises and link directly with the policy process at multiple time and space scales.
d. Bundling
Most ES are produced as joint products (or bundles) from intact ecosystems. The relative rates of production of each service vary from system-to-system, site-to-site, and time-to-time, but we must consider the full range of services and the characteristics of their bundling in order to prevent creating dysfuntional incentives and to maximize the benefits to society. For example, focusing only on the carbon sequestration service of ecosystems may in some instances reduce the overall value of the full range of ES.
e. Scaling
ES are relevant over a broad range of scales in space, time, and complexity. We need measurement, models, accounts, assessments and policy discussions that address these multiple scales, as well as interactions and hierarchies among them.
2. Adaptive Management and New Institutions for Ecosystem Services:
Given that significant levels of uncertainty always exist in ecosystem service measurement, monitoring, modeling, valuation, and management, we should continuously gather and integrate appropriate information regarding ES, with the goal of learning and adaptive improvement. To do this we should constantly evaluate the impacts of existing systems and design new systems with stakeholder participation as experiments from which we can more effectively quantify performance and learn.
a. Property Rights
Given the public goods nature of most ecosystem services, we need institutions that can effectively deal with this characteristic using a more sophisticated suite of property rights regimes. We need institutions that use a balanced combination of existing private property rights systems, and new property rights systems that can propertize ecosystems and their services without privatizing them. Systems of payment for ecosystem services (PES) and common asset trusts can be effective elements in these institutions.
b. Scale-matching
The spatial and temporal scale of the institutions to manage ecosystem services must be matched with the scales of the services themselves. Mutually reinforcing institutions at local, regional and global scales over short, medium and long time scales will be required. Institutions should be designed to ensure the flow of information between scales, to take ownership regimes, cultures, and actors into account, and to fully internalize costs and benefits.
c. Distribution Issues:
Systems should be designed to ensure inclusion of the poor, since they are more dependent on common property assets like ecosystem services. Free-riding should be prevented and beneficiaries should pay for the services they receive from bio-diverse and productive ecosystems.
d. Information Dissemination
One key limiting factor in sustaining natural capital is shared knowledge of how ecosystems function and how they support human well-being. This can be overcome with targeted educational campaigns, clear dissemination of success and failures directed at both the general public and elected officials and through true collaboration among public, private and government entities.
e. Participation
Relevant stakeholders (local, regional, national, and global) should be engaged in the formulation and implementation of management decisions. Full stakeholder awareness and participation contributes to credible, accepted rules that identify and assign the corresponding responsibilities appropriately, and that can be effectively enforced.
f. Science/Policy Interface
ES concepts can be an effective link between science and policy by making the trade-offs more transparent. An ES framework can therefore be a beneficial addition to policy-making institutions and frameworks and to integrating science and policy.
ECOSYSTEM SERVICE PARTNERSHIP
The new Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP – http://www.es-partnership.org/) seeks to enhance this integration by uniting the ecosystem services science and policy community and coordinating collaborative efforts on a global, national and local level. It aims to enhance and encourage a diversity of approaches, where needed, while reducing unnecessary duplication of effort in the conceptualization and application of ecosystem services. By increasing efficiency, and promoting better practice, the ESP aims to increase the effectiveness of ES science, policy, and applications.
Evaluation of the Ecosystem Service Assessments during the excursion on June 11th, 2010 in the surroundings of Salzau castle
Thursday, 29. July 2010
Please note:
Monday, 10. May 2010
Accommodation is automatically booked for your stay at Salzau Castle, only. Please remember to book a hotel room for your stay in Kiel before June 8th and after June 10th!
Travel information and conference venues
Monday, 10. May 2010
Download of documents and course information
Wednesday, 24. February 2010
1. Abstracts: Since February 23rd, 2010 all submitted abstracts are documented and can be downloaded from the workshop web page (go to “Documents” –> “Abstracts”).
2. Course: Due to the demands of the registered participants the course on “Fuzzy Modelling of Ecosystem Services” by Prof. Dr. Bai-Lian Larry Li from the University of California at Riverside can be carried out. It will be scheduled to June12th and 13th. The course location will be the Ecology Centre of Kiel University. For the course, an additional registration fee will be necessary. There are still free places for participants. More detailled information will be posted soon.
3. Excursion: As the number of registered participants for the excursion has also exceeded a critical mass, we are planning to realize this trip around the coast of the Baltic Sea and the hilly landscape of the “Holsteinische Schweiz”. We hope that several problems and methods of ecosystem quantification and valuation can be discussed “in the real world”. Also for the excursion we will need an additional monetary contribution of about 45,00 €. Interested participants should register before the end of March 2010.
Britta Witt (bwitt@ecology.uni-kiel.de)
Circular mail to participants (February 2010)
Tuesday, 16. February 2010
Dear colleagues,
Thanks for your interest in the 2010 Salzau Conference on “Solutions for Sustaining Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services: Designing Socio-Ecological Institutions”.
We have been surprised about the extraordinary feed backs from your side and we are happy to inform you that our web page has been opened. You can find it at the following address:
http://www.uni-kiel.de/ecology/projects/salzau/
To continue the preparation of the meeting on schedule, today we have
the following requests:
- Registration: Some of you have announced to participate but have not registered up to now. Please send us the attached registration form back before February 28th.
- Abstracts: The topic and theme coordinators will start arranging the schedules of the four workshops in March 2010. For this purpose it will be extremely helpful if you submit a short abstract of your planned contributions. Please send it to before the end of February 2010.
- Background papers: We are grateful that some of you are planning to submit a background paper on a certain problem concerning ecosystem services. The background papers should describe the state-of-the-art in the respective field of research or application, derive most important research questions and argue for topical items to be discussed during the workshop (What do we know? Where are the main problems? How can we solve them?). All “theme coordinators” have been asked to produce or coordinate a background paper and present it during the conference, and all participants are invited to submit a background paper. It would be very nice if we could use many multi-author background papers during the workshop, but of course also single-author papers are most welcome. The arranged groups of authors in the proposed schedule (workshop preparation file and call for papers) are suggestions which were made on the base of the preparing e-mail exchange in the last summer. Of course colleagues. it is possible to change the authorships or to work together with other. These papers will be submitted to the online platform “Encyclopedia of Earth” (http://www.eoearth.org/). We are very happy that Mrs. Ida Kubiszewski from the University of Vermont will support the submission process. Therefore, please send your background paper to the following address: and add a copy to F. Müller to update the conference web page. You should enclose your paper as a word file and add a short cv of yourself. You should be aware that there will be a review process and that the editors of the encyclopedia are asking us to avoid jargon, because (besides the conference participants) the web page aims at “an educated and interdisciplinary public”. We are hoping that the background papers can be available end of February. Of course also later submissions will be welcome. For your information some guidelines for authors of the Encyclopedia have been attached to this mail.
- Commented hypothesis papers: If you wish to influence the line-of-argumentation or foster the discussions during the workshop, if you have a burning question, if you see an important problem or if you want to provoke an intensive exchange of certain arguments, it will be a good idea to send us a “commented hypothesis paper”. For these papers there are no formal requirements. They should be short but they should lead the reader to the focal problem on the base of a comprehensive and serious introduction. They should be convincing and in fact, they should be based on a (may be provocative) hypothesis. The theme coordinators will use these papers for structuring the workshops and for sure the authors will be asked to present them at Salzau. The hypothesis papers will be published at the conference web page and all participants will be informed about the submission. Therefore, they should be sent as a word file to Felix Müller .
- Hotel reservations: During the core workshop we will be accommodated at Salzau Castle. The rooms will be booked with you registration automatically. Your stays in Kiel before June 7 and after June 10 should be carried out in a self-organized manner. In Kiel you should look for a hotel near the main station (e.g. InterCity Hotel, Berliner Hof, Astor, Best Western, Basic Hotels, Hotel am Schwedenkai, Hotel an der Hörn,…), using e.g. one of the following web pages: http://www.hotel.de/de.hotels/Kiel_36306/hotels.aspx or http://www.kurskiel.de/index.php?clang=en&active_id=1 . As the holiday season will be starting in June, we recommend to book the hotel very quickly.
- Potential room sharing in Salzau: As the number of participants is higher than expected already now, it might be necessary to deviate from your accommodation preferences. We will inform you in time if a new arrangement is necessary or if the number of participants exceeds a critical threshold.
- Special session: Prof. Dr. S.E. Joergensen from Copenhagen has proposed a special session on ecosystem service modeling. You can find his invitation in the enclosure. If you wish to participate, please send a short mail to him < msijapan@hotmail.com> and a copy to us.
- Meeting of the Ecosystem Service Partnership: Prof. Dr. R. de Groot has asked us to reserve some time for a meeting of the Ecosystem Service Partnership. If you wish to learn more about this organization, please visit the web page at < http://www.fsd.nl/esp>. Please tell us if you have any problem or any good idea.
Thanks for your cooperation.
Best regards
Felix Müller
Benjamin Burkhard
Franziska Kroll
Britta Witt
Wilhelm Windhorst
Enclosures:
Landeskulturzentrum Salzau near Kiel (Germany)
June 7th 2010 – June 11th 2010.
Route to Salzau (Google Maps)