An American study has shown that high-priority sites for biodiversity conservation yield many of the world's ecosystem services, and suggests that by paying stewards of such areas, their benefits could be maintained and poverty could be alleviated.

Land areas that are a priority for wildlife conservation provide relatively high levels of ‘ecosystem services;’ these are services which are essential or important and are provided by the environment, such as pollination, water purification, food production, and climate regulation.

Safeguarding these services is imperative; however, assessing their benefits to populations in ways that are translate to the policy makers who guide conservation efforts has proven difficult. The UK government White Paper, released in June 2011, attempted to attribute financial costs to environment services, to convey their worth to political and business decision makers.  

Now a study published in the US journal BioScience has attempted to look at the issue on an international scale. The study, by Will R. Turner of Conservation International and his colleagues, analyses the flow of benefits from ecosystem services under a variety of socioeconomic assumptions and in greater spatial detail than previous studies.

The analysis, which divides the globe into more than 58,000 hexagons, finds that over half the global value of ecosystem services benefitting the world's poorest people originates in areas that are a high priority for conservation. Moreover, the value of ecosystem services generated by the top quarter of biodiversity sites is more than triple the effective cost of conserving them.

If there were effective and equitable mechanisms to ensure that the beneficiaries of ecosystem services paid those responsible for stewarding them, Turner and his colleagues conclude, global benefits to poor communities would increase by 50 percent, and the payments would amount to more than a dollar per person per day for about a third of the 1.1 billion people in the world living in dire poverty. The authors say their findings reinforce the idea that there is an important concordance between biodiversity, provision of ecosystem services, and poverty that policymakers could use in designing equitable payment schemes to address both poverty and loss of biodiversity.

Suggestions made in white paper unpopular with farmers

The 2011 UK Government White Paper made similar recommendations, which were contested by the livestock industry on its release. The scientists who contributed to the report suggested farmers of low value or loss making produce on land that could provide other benefits be paid for maintaining forests for carbon storage, nature reserves and other ecosystem services. The report’s authors suggested Welsh hill farmers maintain woodlands for leisure, biomass and carbon storage instead of relatively low value livestock farming.

Professor Ian Bateman of the University of East Anglia, who made the suggestion, explained his logic, “I am not anti- farming. We need to produce as much of our own food as possible, if only to ensure our supplies are secure. But in some areas farmers would produce far greater value for society if they were paid to also produce wildlife and recreation as well as food. It is not about having a go at farmers, because they are only doing what we are paying them to do. It is about paying them in more intelligent ways.”

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