Functional Value of Biodiversity Project

FUNCTIONAL VALUE OF BIODIVERSITY PROJECT

(A BNPP ‘Forest And Biodiversity’ Window Project)

IN BRIEF: Objectives, Approach, Impacts

11 July 2002

Objective: provide a sound basis for identifying and designing policies and projects that use forest conservation as a tool for maintaining the level, quality, and regularity of water flows.

Efforts to ‘mainstream’ biodiversity have been frustrated by lack of scientifically based, comprehensive assessments of the functional contribution of biodiversity conservation to rural livelihoods and economic development. While there are many such functional contributions, one of the most frequently discussed is the contribution of conservation to maintenance of key hydrological processes. It is supposed – plausibly but without much evidence – that changes in upland land use practices could help poor hill-dwellers, conserve biodiversity, and provide ‘bankable’ benefits for downslope urban-dwellers. Yet lack of rigor or depth in these discussions could lead both to overlooked opportunities and to unrealistic expectations. For instance, it is possible that in some water basins peri-urban wetlands are both more threatened and more critical to urban flood prevention than upland forests.

This project will assist the Bank and its clients in project development and policy analysis by:

providing systematic assessments, for significant areas of the humid tropics, of the hydrological value of forests with biodiversity significance in promoting local livelihoods and resilience to economic and environmental shocks.
assessing the nature, magnitude, geographical scope, and relation to biodiversity and poverty of these hydrological values and processes
forging a strategic partnerships between the ASB (Alternatives to Slash and Burn) Consortium of CGIAR-affiliated research organizations and their local partners (with expertise in agronomy, forestry, biology, and local-scale hydrological processes), with the scientific research community (with expertise in large-scale hydrological processes) and with the World Bank ( with expertise in poverty, economic geography, and environmental services)
developing and applying analytic tools to the operational and policy concerns.

Tasks and framework

The project will look across potential hydrological impacts of forest loss such as: flooding, changes in dry season flow, changes in total water yield, sedimentation, and an landslide risk. It will look across different scales: continental, water basin, small watershed, microwatershed. It will try to answer the following questions:

which kinds of hydrological impacts can be expected at different scales? For instance, it will assess the propositions that large-scale deforestation has no impact on flooding or sedimentation at the level of large water basins. This proposition is widely believed by hydrologists and widely disbelieved by just about everyone else. But quantitative assessments are lacking.
what downstream and downslope areas are vulnerable to hydrological impacts of forest modification? -- and what are their characteristics? How many people are vulnerable? Are the most vulnerable also the poorest?
Where are the critical ‘hydrological hotspot’ areas where land cover change might cause such vulnerability? What are the biodiversity characteristics of these areas? How many people live in these areas? How poor are they? (for areas where poverty data is available)
What are the policy implications of these relationships? Under what geophysical, social, and economic conditions does it make sense to intervene, and what kinds of interventions are available? Where data permit: are vulnerable populations richer than ‘hydrological hotspot’ populations? (in which case environmental services markets might be advisable) – or vice versa (in which case such markets would have perverse distributional consequences).

The project attacks these questions by assembling spatial data on land cover, topography poverty, and biodiversity, applying models of hydrological flows, and assessing results based on an understanding of underlying agronomic, economic, and biophysical processes. Study areas include:

the global humid tropics, at coarse resolution
Central America and Montane Mainland Southeast Asia at higher resolution
the Mae Chaem watershed (Thailand) and a Central American watershed (tentatively designated as the Rio Paz of El Salvador) at fine resolution

Current and intended project impacts

Links to forest policy dialogue and operational projects

The greatest hoped-for impact of the project is in shaping the agenda related to developing environmental services markets and other approaches to mainstream biodiversity based on palpable impacts on water quality, quantity, and regularity. The ‘environmental services of forests’ agenda is prominent in the Bank’s Environmental Strategy, its revised Forest Policy and in the new PROFOR (Programme for Forests) partnership to be hosted by the Bank. It is an active topic of interest in the LAC region, where environmental service systems projects have been implemented and are under discussion. Other regions (ECA, EAS, SAR and AFR) have also expressed interest and discussions are underway to assist them in introducing the concept at an operational level.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The project is an important contribution to the ASB cross-cutting assessment of ‘Forest and Agroecosystems Tradeoffs in the Tropics’ that has been selected as a sub-global component of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). The datasets and knowledge generated by the BNPP project will also be of direct relevance to the lead authors of several chapters of the three global-scale assessment reports; Trends and Conditions, Scenarios, and Response Options. The project is of particular relevance to the MA since it too is designed to identify opportunities for joint improvement in the provision of (multiple) ecosystem services and in human well-being

World Development Report 2003

The project’s initial phase contributed to some of the Report’s most important analytic and graphical characterization of population links to fragile lands and to forests, a foundation of the spatial framework that guided the report.

Contributions to poverty assessments

The project may contribute to poverty and vulnerability assessments by linking newly available spatial maps of poverty (developed in DEC) to other kinds of geographical information.

Helping build datasets of global interest and applicability

High resolution urban area and administrative division data have already been used as input for the next improved version of the Gridded Population of the World (GPW 3) dataset by CIESIN, a standard reference dataset used for many purposes. The project expects to produce and disseminate a much wider array of applicable data.

Building bridges between the policy and scientific communities

The project is linking geophysical researchers on hydrology, with powerful scientific tools but weak links to policy, with policy-oriented social scientists.