Ecosystem Services Markets

Ecosystem Services Markets

Ecosystem Services Markets. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Today we wrap up our series of reports by Patrick Mazza, Climate Solutions Research Director on Building the Biocarbon Economy. Mazza has written a series of papers that delve into the various aspects of the subject including biodigesters, the re-grounding of agriculture and capturing carbon. Today Mazza discusses an interesting idea under the heading of Ecosystem Services Markets. MAZZA: When farmers do farming and they do it with certain techniques they provide other services to society especially in the area of water. There are markets developing that pay farmers to manage their lands in ways that help us with water management. This is happening around the country. In Oregon actually we have one of the most advanced developments of an ecosystems services market. It's called the Willamette Ecosystems Marketplace and it is centered around a group called the Willamette Partnership. MAZZA: It's an alignment of public agencies, environmental groups and industry to support a range of ecosystem services. They include clean water, fish and wildlife. A lot of this came out of work on salmon restoration where it was identified what needed to be done to restore the salmon so this group got some funding to create a system which basically creates currencies. Mazza says this really is the first of its kind in the country. MAZZA: So what the Willamette Partnership has been doing is creating a standard crediting process for currencies in 4 areas. Those are wetlands, salmon habitat, upland prairie habitat and water temperature, basically getting everybody who's in that marketplace to come to an agreement on what different ecosystems services actions are worth so this creates the marketplace. The big fear for selling these kinds of services has been double dipping and Mazza says it's important to limit the payments from service to action. He says they really take a look at what an action does to the land. MAZZA: The landowner can actually go out, find the best market, find the most profitable market and even divide their land a little bit so an action on one part of their land has its greatest value for one ecosystem service and a part of their land has value for another ecosystem service so they're really finding a way to get the maximum return. You can find the complete report on their website and more information on clean energy at harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org
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