Colin T Reid and Walters Nsoh, The Privatisation of Biodiversity? New Approaches to Conservation Law
| Pages | 324-325 |
| Author | |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2018.0497 |
Biological diversity (biodiversity) is under threat – this we all know – under a seemingly relentless onslaught of climate change, population growth, urbanisation and waste. In recent years the related concept of “ecosystem services” has achieved wide currency, encompassing the services that nature provides in a developing, but fairly standard, classification. These services may be “provisioning”, e.g. food; “regulating”, e.g. water purification; or “cultural” e.g. amenity value. “Supporting” services such as photosynthesis, or the water cycle, underpin all of these and biodiversity can also be classed as a supporting service. Professor Reid is a well-known expert in biodiversity and nature conservation law and this book was an output of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2012 to 2014, on which Dr Nsoh was the researcher.
Ecosystem services is a natural science concept, but one which has been of much interest to policy-makers, and to social scientists of various types. An ecosystem approach is found embedded in the policy guidance under the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the Rio Summit. Arguably, in the social sciences, ecosystem services have been of most interest to economists, especially resource economists, who see the concept as a way to embed the valuation of natural resources – natural capital, another closely related concept – into decision-making, both public and private. Within that, “Payments for Ecosystem Services” (“PES”) schemes are one set of mechanisms to identify, and shift, the costs of protecting these services – for example, when downstream water users explicitly pay the costs of better land management practices upstream, to protect the catchment source. These are being widely used in Latin America, for example, under national schemes. It is helpful, and probably essential, that the book starts with some explanation of these and related terms.
Lawyers are also interested in the concept, from different perspectives. Economic schemes need legal frameworks to implement them. Public lawyers may see ecosystem services and PES as a way to supplement, or improve, traditional command and control mechanisms to manage the environment, and protect biodiversity. Private lawyers may see opportunities for clients to acquire assets, or obtain payments for activities on land they own. Lawyers may share different perspectives of the concept and its use. For example, there are strongly held views...
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