‘Top Ten’ Screening Criteria Assessing Opportunities for an Ecosystem Services Approach Introduce ourselves Today, here at ACES, I suspect we’re preaching to the converted – I assume we’re all excited about the potential of ecosystem services. And we probably know thousands of great ideas and hear hundreds of proposals every month for using ecosystem service approaches in conservation. But there are limited funds to support projects – these days extremely limited funds! - so how do we pick the ‘best bets’? Today we are presenting a set of screening criteria that can help to do just this developed as a heuristic tool for assessing whether opportunities to use an ecosystem services approach are likely to succeed in achieving conservation goals based on enabling conditions observed through the literature, case studies and experiences of TNC, WWF and NatCap developed as a collaboration – TNC ecosystem services team, the Natural Capital Project and WWF-US Today, we’ll introduce you to the criteria: their scope, content, and plans for future development Rather than giving a dry explanation of the criteria one-by-one, we’re going to make this session participatory: Get you to use the criteria in practice to evaluate a real project – ideally we’d have time to present you with a whole panel of projects, and get you to deliberate them in groups but given time constraints we’ll just use one, and do a simple vote. Bruce McKenney, The Nature Conservancy Belinda Morris, The Nature Conservancy Emily McKenzie, Natural Capital Project & WWF-US

Ecosystem services approach Integrating ecosystem services in decisions Regulations Payments Markets Increasing interest in ecosystem service approaches for conservation. Why? Means to an end or end in itself is debated But very few people would doubt that integrating ecosystems services into public and private decisions has great potential to make conservation mainstream New argument for relevance of conservation to wider group of interests Create new sustainable sources of funding. How? using ecosystem service concepts to argue for conservation using ecosystem service mapping and valuation tools to raise awareness of ES values and shape policies to sustain them developing policies and incentives to maintain services Regulations, payments, markets, subsidies & taxes Fiscal incentives

Not equally viable in all contexts More than geographic overlap Now have science tools to find areas where multiple services and biodiversity are located. But a promising opportunity requires more than geographic overlap of ecosystem service and biodiversity priorities. The likelihood of effectively achieving outcomes for conservation depends on various enabling conditions e.g. ecosystem services must have significant value to people i.e. there are beneficiaries who are willing to pay actions to restore or sustain those services must be feasible, economically viable and more cost-effective than alternatives Unless conservation practitioners reflect on the suitability of their sites using these – or other – criteria, scarce and valuable resources will be wasted.

‘Top Ten’ Screening Criteria Will the service & conservation be delivered? Are legal, institutional, social & economic conditions supportive? Top 10 + ? - Service delivery Measurability Scale / replicable Alternatives … Hence, we developed screening criteria: Top Ten enabling conditions that influence likelihood of success Prioritize opportunities Design projects Format: Criteria, ideal conditions / best case, questions to consider - Practical tool - help prioritise, select and refine project opportunities - Learning tool - interactive sessions to evaluate case studies…what we’re about to do now! Strong Weak Information gap

You try out the criteria! Is this a viable ES project that deserves investment of conservation funds? Introduce voting exercise Bruce’s pitch Vote Ask a ‘yay’ and ‘nay’ sayer to explain why. ? or

Conservation delivery Scale Alternatives Providers & beneficiaries Top 10 + ? - Service delivery Service measurement Conservation delivery Scale Alternatives Providers & beneficiaries Benefits & costs Legal/institutional & capacity Stakeholders, equity, viability Economic context Bruce explains evaluation of pitch

Refining the criteria Upper Yangtze Sierra Puget Sound Nevada Mexico Mekong Andes Hawai’i Amazon Eastern Arc Mtns Borneo & Sumatra We are continuing to revise and refine the criteria Using them with sites at TNC, WWF and he Natural Capital Project Future research to: determine which criteria matter most how this varies across contexts how the criteria interrelate how different conditions affect the choice between alternative instruments for providing ecosystem services also evaluate usefulness as a practical tool Can find the criteria at this website, copies also available as hand-outs. Feedback welcome Website: www.naturalcapitalproject.org/ConEX Contact: bmckenney@tnc.org emily.mckenzie@wwfus.org bmorris@tnc.org 7