Internship Opportunity

A functioning market for ecosystem or biodiversity services requires a simple, accurate (not precise) valuation framework. This paid internship opportunity will evaluate, create, and test an ecosystem or biodiversity framework.

This internship has four primary objectives:

• Survey, describe (one paragraph each), and rank the discoverable attempts to create a valuation system for ecosystem or biodiversity services. Ranking may include, but is not limited to, 
  • Ease of use and accessible by normal citizens,
  • Reasonably values actions that an individual landowner might perform, and
  • Appears to encourage the "right" behaviors, or largely avoids the problems inherent within the carbon market
• Speak with and/or interview ecological restoration firms, practicing ecologists, and land management organizations (land trusts), to solicit input on the essential elements of a simple yet functional land stewardship valuation framework (i.e., I take this action, and it yields that outcome, and marketable "credit"). 
• Create a first-draft ecosystem or biodiversity services valuation framework and test it on a variety of real-world project types, with a final analysis and report, covering these or similar project types:
  • • Wetland Health Improvement
    • Forest Health Improvement 
    • Lawn to Meadow Conversion
    • Riparian Forest Buffer
    • Residential Rewilding
• Present your summary and findings to a panel of experts (TBD).

Location

This internship would best be performed within our offices, co-located with our research and restoration staff, but may be performed remotely in certain circumstances.

Work Week Expectations

Expect to work and collaborate with other team members four days per week.

Introduction

The US Forest Service is awarding over $100M (total) in grant funding to organizations with novel ideas to reduce the barriers that impede normal, everyday US citizens from participating in future ecosystem and biodiversity services markets. 

Background

President Ronald Reagan ushered into existence a new concept wherein organizations could be "paid" for restoring or replacing lost wetlands at a valuation greater than the cost of performing the work. His idea, now entrenched, is that if a development company wants to build a shopping mall on 10 acres of wetland, it must pay for the creation of new wetlands 2.5x the size, or 25 acres in this example. From the 1990s, a new "wetland mitigation bank" system has been functioning wherein ecological restoration firms buy or lease land from private landowners suitable for the creation of new wetlands, and then create those wetlands. These new wetlands are converted into "credits" that can be sold to the shopping mall developer so that the developer does not have to create the wetlands themselves. Wetlands became the first bankable ecological marketplace in the United States.

Today

The 2020s have witnessed a second ecosystem services market emerge around the concept of sequestering carbon.  CO2 emitters are compelled, in some places in the world, to "offset" their emissions by engaging in CO2 reduction activities elsewhere. A new market has emerged that allows some investor-backed organizations to plant new forests with the singular focus being on calculating the maximum amount of carbon that the new forest can store in their biomass. Although this market is working, it is beleaguered with critics that (rightly) point out that planting 1000 acres of just one tree species (that maximizes the carbon credits) is not a forest at all.

Going Forward

Since the 1970s, there have been a wide variety of initiatives to somehow place a value on the ecosystem services that any place in the world provides to wildlife, humans, and the overall well-being of the planet. The goal is to create a framework that provides financial returns, probably through a market trading mechanism, to landowners that invest in the health of their land to benefit themselves and the rest of the world. Although none have been deemed an unqualified success, there is optimism around creating a valuation framework that encourages the right kind of behavior while being easy to use.

Currently, there is no functioning market that provides returns to landowners that invest in the health of their land, outside of wetland banking and offsetting carbon. This has led to gross market distortions that are easy to see nearly everywhere in the first, second and third worlds. In the United States, for example, 100s of billions of dollars are wasted on planting and maintaining the largest crop of invasive species in the world - the lawn.

The lawn consumes vast amounts of human capital, is responsible for the wasting of more fresh water than any other use, and directly causes the application of millions of tons of pesticides and harmful fertilizers that damage vast ecosystems and human livelihoods, such as the Chesapeake Bay. Yet, this behavior persists because the lawn is considered to be the "least expensive" way to manage land. Landowners do not and will not consider other land uses that would cost them more money without their being some amount of compensation. Hence, the need for a functioning market to provide financial returns for landowners that instead manage their land with healthy forests, meadows, wetlands, shrublands, and grasslands.