#26 - Key concepts you should be aware of - part 1

This twenty sixth issue of The Nature Intelligence Newsletter shines a light on 5 key concepts for biodiversity practionners. It covers:

• Rewilding vs restoration
• Shadow price for biodiversity: transition costs and integrating the cost of biodiversity loss into decision-making
• Slow-onset events and shifting baselines: why does it feel like the biodiversity crisis is not urgent, when it actually is

When signing-up for The Nature Intelligence Newsletter, you're promised "High-quality content on nature/biodiversity, impact/footprint & dependency: definitions, measures & implementation", this issue focuses on the "definitions" part. It seeks to raise capacity on key concepts I believe are critical but not well-known in our field. There is no logical link between its three sections unfortunately, except that they are all about major concepts.

Enjoy your reading!

Differences between rewilding and restoration

Due to a technical limitation of LinkedIn which does not allow integration of posts with multiple pictures, I'm rewriting here content from two posts, linked in the text.

Rewilding vs ecological restoration: are you clear about what both mean? Both approaches seek to achieve ecosystem recovery but they differ in how to achieve it and Cain Blythe (CEO / Founder at CreditNature & Ecosulis) summarized nicely some key differences. His summary is based on an article by Clémentine Mutillod et al.

Ecological restoration

In short:

- concept since the mid-1930s

- focus on assisting the recovery of ecosystems

- generally lower-scale

- can work with invertebrates and microbes

- more direct human interventions

- widely recognised in environmental policy

Rewilding

In short:

- concept since the 1990s

- focus on self-sustaining and resilient ecosystems

- generally large-scale (landscapes)- prioritise the reintroduction of large herbivores and predators

- minimise human involvement post-initial interventions

- limited to no policy support

Due to its focus on landscape level interventions, rewilding is probably harder to implement by individual companies and emerging biodiversity credit frameworks are better suited to ecological restoration. However both strategies are necessary to achieve significant gains for biodiversity.

More comprehensive comparison

Here is the full comparison Cain made, building on the work of his company Ecosulis , which delivers "both ecological restoration and rewilding strategies, often in sequence, ensuring that the best outcomes are achieved for people and nature".

📚Historical context: Ecological restoration, often dating back to the mid-1930s, focuses on assisting the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. Rewilding, which emerged in the late 1990s, aims at rebuilding a natural ecosystem after human disturbance by restoring ecosystem functions, processes and food webs to become a self-sustaining and resilient ecosystem. Despite their different approaches (e.g., top-down versus bottom-up, functional versus taxonomic), both strategies share a common goal of ecosystem recovery.

🐜Engineers and Keystones: Ecological restoration frequently employs invertebrates and microbes as keystone species, leveraging their impact on ecosystem functions like soil formation and nutrient cycling. Rewilding tends to prioritise the reintroduction of large herbivores and predators to reinstate ecological processes and trophic dynamics, illustrating a shift from micro to macro scale in restoring ecological balance.

🗺️Scale of Intervention: Ecological restoration projects are marked by their implementation at relatively smaller scales, constrained by the complexity and resource-intensive nature of such interventions. In contrast, rewilding targets larger landscapes, emphasising the restoration of broad ecological processes and facilitating species movement, reflecting a strategic shift towards landscape-scale conservation.

👩🌾Human Intervention and Predictability: Ecological restoration involves more direct human intervention, from soil remediation to native species replanting, aiming for specific, predictable outcomes based on historical or desired ecological states. Rewilding, by embracing lower predictability, focuses on the restoration of ecological functions and processes, seeking to minimise human involvement post-initial interventions to encourage autonomous ecosystem dynamics.

📝Policy and Implementation: While ecological restoration is widely recognised and integrated into environmental policy and practice, rewilding's representation in policy frameworks is still emerging, reflecting its novelty and the challenges associated with its open-ended objectives.

Shadow price of biodiversity: estimating transition costs and integrating the social costs of biodiversity loss in decision-making

Work is under way to break down this shadow price (full definition buried in this report) by industry (the opportunities, and thus the costs, to reduce or abate negative impacts vary by industry) and geography.

Overall, the shadow price is the lower bound of the social cost and a shadow price of 5€/MSA.m2 could thus be used in companies' internal budgets to calculate a lower boundary of the social cost of biodiversity loss, just like they use an internal social cost of carbon. Activities with a negative return on investment when the social costs are included should probably not be financed.

Some remarks:

• it may be argued that ecosystem condition is not what matters for the shadow price and that ecosystem service value matters more
• if we lose species, we will slowly or abruptly (depending on whether the species has a redundant function or not) lose ecosystem services (ES), but I believe that the the best proxy of ES provision is ecosystem condition. And that metrics of species extinction risk such as STAR are a worse proxy than ecosystem condition. Because losing 1 endangered species does not necessarily lead to a loss of ES and it is also captured by ecosystem condition.
• the 5 €/MSA.m2 (or 5 million €/MSA. km2) is a rough estimate. On the abatement & restoration curve displayed in the picture (extracted from this report), total costs (and not costs per year) are displayed. But conversely, one should note confuse MSA. km2 and km2 restored. In order to restore entirely the equivalent of 1 MSA. km2, you usually need several km2 because each km2 will only gain 20% to 30% MSA (e.g. improving from 50% to 70% MSA). In other words: an ecosystem is never restored from 0% to 100% MSA. So the costs is likely to be multiplied by 3 to 5 if km2 restored is the indicator considered and not MSA. km2.

Reference for a discussion of social cost of carbon vs shadow price of carbon: Price, Richard, Simeon Thornton, and Stephen Nelson. 2007. ‘The Social Cost of Carbon and the Shadow Price of Carbon: What They Are, and How to Use Them in Economic Appraisal in the UK’.

Slow-onset events and shifting baselines: the curse of biodiversity

We lost most biodiversity in Europe and yet we did not die, so what?

I had been thinking for a number of years about the issue of shifting baseline and the paradox that the biodiversity crisis is much more worrying than the climate one for humanity but people tend to underestimate its importance (and sometimes I also wondered: we lost most biodiversity in Europe and yet we did not die, so what?): the “slow-onset events” concept really helped me properly frame the topic. Thanks to Zsolt Lengyel for his shifting baseline post about a year ago which enriched my thinking with this notion of “slow-onset events”!

The other key concept, I think, is that rich economies just displaced their issues and started destroying biodiversity in the global south to maintain their lifestyle. Once all biodiversity is destroyed, this will not be possible any more.

For the rock fans: the song is The Sixth Extinction by Ayreon & the live video.

The shifting baseline comic was drawn 5 years ago by Cameron Shepherd.

The concept of slow-onset events was introduced by UN Climate Change in Cancun (COP16).

Disclaimer: all views are mine and do not represent any institution or initiative's.

Access previous issues of the Nature Intelligence Newsletter:

Case studies and examples

#01 - Impacts on ecosystem integrity of a listed equity index assessed for the first time - STOXX600

#08 - Getting inspired: 3 front-runners who assessed their biodiversity impacts at the corporate level

#09 - Ecosystem condition: direct measurement and assessment of regulatory offsets

Ecosystem condition definition and metrics

#02 - All you ever wanted to know about the MSA

#03 - Ecosystem condition: the indicator to watch for corporate biodiversity performance

Biodiversity measurement tools

#04 – Differences between the corporate biodiversity metrics

#05 - Charting path: navigating the biodiversity tool wilderness - part 1 - The compasses

#06 - Charting path: navigating the biodiversity tool wilderness - part 2 - The map

#07 - Charting path: navigating the biodiversity tool wilderness - part 3 - Tools for financial institutions

Biodiversity credits

#10 - Biodiversity credits: definition and main actors

#11 - Biodiversity credits: uncovering the use cases

#12 - Biodiversity credits: deep-dive on use cases, demand and market size

#13 - Biodiversity credits: counterbalancing impacts with clear ecological equivalency rules

#15 - Biodiversity credits: lessons & key differences of 4 leading schemes

#16 - Biodiversity credits: 4 issues you need to know about

#17 - Biodiversity credits trends: market & price

#20 - Biodiversity credits: the cooking analogy - understanding indicators

#23 - Biodiversity credits - the ingredients - main indicators used by BC schemes?

#24 - Biodiversity credits - insights from a deep-dive on the recipe of 13 leading schemes

Align

#14 - Align - Best practices for biodiversity measurement & compliance of existing tools

The Ecosystem Condition Protocol (EC Protocol)

#18 - The Ecosystem Condition Protocol: introduction, needs, goals and linkages to other frameworks

#19 - The Ecosystem Condition Protocol: the what and how of this missing piece of the corporate biodiversity puzzle

COP16

#21 - COP16 - intro, disappointments and hopes

#22 - COP16 - progress on metrics, biodiversity credits, IP, DSI; failure on financing & monitoring

Thought leadership: Translating Biodiversity Goals into Action: A Global Budget Approach (2024)

#25 - Building biodiversity trajectories similar to climate: from global to companies

Credits: the cover of this issue was made using Bing Copilot Designer.