5th Drop: "Regulating Services" in Lake Victoria

~ HELLO! Hope reading week is going fine for everybody :) Here is a mid-week post!

"Regulating Services"?

Now I have been talking an awful lot about ecosystem services but strangely enough, have yet to properly expand on the concept of ecosystem services! Apologies for such a late and haphazard clarification :X So the concept of ecosystem services was first popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 

"Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling."

So while we have been focusing mainly on provision services, I think it is time we moved on to other definitions of ecosystem services and to see the feasibility of accounting for these services to help promote sustainable management of ecosystems in Africa.

More specifically regulating services of ecosystems can be understood as functions and components of ecosystems that affect the reliability and resilience of the ecosystems to continue their provisionservices - ability to allow ecosystems to continue to produce over a range of stresses or shocks. In this week's post we will look specifically at one such regulating service of nutrient buffering by wetlands in Lake Victoria.

Regulating Service - Nutrient Buffering by Wetlands in Lake Victoria

Simonit and Perrings (2011) developed a bioeconomic model using water and nutrients data from a catchment in Lake Victoria to understand the interactions between agriculture and fisheries activities as mediated by wetlands of the lake margins. More specifically they hope to account for the nutrient buffering service provided by wetlands - filtering of nutrient runoff from agricultural land before discharge enters into Lake Victoria. As highlighted in the last post fisheries in Lake Victoria are key sources of income and food for locals within the catchment, but are however facing declines in fish landings. This decline in fisheries production has been attributed to overfishing and more importantly eutrophication - nutrient runoff from agricultural lands and discharges from urban settlements. Wetlands in particular are of interest here because they serve as  buffers by absorbing some of these nutrients released by runoff from agricultural and urban areas. However they are increasingly being threatened by land-use changes.

Here are some reflections that I had:

1) Valuing regulating services by the provision services that are being protected/ threatened

• Regulating services like water quality are harder to value: less understood and easily measured 
• Relating regulating services to the provision services benefits/ losses help provide a more quantifiable approach - externality of nutrient loading related to fisheries output losses
• Value of regulating services vary with the value of the protected service as well as variability of environmental conditions (withstand greater variability, greater value of service)
• Externality of nutrient loading can thus vary across different agriculture areas
• Authors also compared the benefits from nutrient loading (greater agricultural output) against losses of fisheries outputs
• "...loss of regulating services would not warrant conservation of the wetland."
• While I can see the economic logic behind this statement, I believe a key point that should not be forgotten is that the services (and hence value) of wetlands should not be viewed in isolation.

> Article provides a key method and perspective of valuing regulating service by relating it to the respective provision service. This is helpful in emphasizing the importance of the ecosystem as a holistic structure rather than just individual services.

2) Translating value of regulating services into payment-for-ecosystem services

• Authors highlighted the potential for payment-for-ecosystem services
• Through payment for on-farm nutrient buffering to make up for losses in wetland buffering
• Different considerations of spatial distribution of externality will thus lead to differences in payments by individuals as well
• Externality by source (farmers most guilty of nutrient loading) vs Externality assigned to converted area (farmers on converted wetlands)
• More social/ legal considerations of rights i.e. rights to clean water vs property rights

> The implementation of payment-for-ecosystem services solutions for regulating services is possible too as long as values can be realistically assigned to them. More importantly the article has also highlighted the complicated social and legal considerations that must be taken when adopting such payment-for-ecosystem services approach. If properly considered and implemented such an approach could potentially allow for a more sustainable form of development within Africa, where development can co-exist with ecosystems conservation.

THANKS for reading this fairly long post again and hope my reflections would be of some help :)

~Till Next Time~

National Geographic Society Photo by Claudine Swiatek