Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are scary things.   The occur when populations of algae explode in coastal environments.  The algae suck up the oxygen and release neurotoxins into the water, and even the local air.   Fisheries and beaches have to be shut down.  People have been killed.  HABs aren't predictable, but its clear that they more damaging and more common than they were in the past due to nutrient pollution in coastal areas.

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The usually excellent Mongabay ran the scare headline, "Could industrial interests ruin payments for environmental services?" on a piece in Tropical Conservation Science.  Thankfully the authors of the paper being reported on, "Upscaling Payments for Environmental Services (PES): Critical issues" are a little less alarmist.  Nonetheless, I think that that their concern about large companies getting involved in ecosystem service markets is overwrought. PES have traditionally been conceived and applied in contexts where the providers of the service are populations (as opposed to industrial companies) – fishermen, farmers, forest dwellers.

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Richard Conniff has an eloquent piece up at Yale Environment 360 discussing how we place economic value on species and biodiversity in general.   He tells the story of how farmers in India inadverdantly killed 99% of the country's vultures by feeding their cattle anti-inflamatory drugs.  The drugs caused renal failure in vultures feeding on the carcasses.  With the vultures gone, India's feral dog population skyrocketed, and the feral dogs gave many people rabies.

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Two papers crossed my desk yesterday highlighting the role insurance can play in mitigating environmental risk.  The first, by Yin et. al. in Risk Analysis, discusses three appoaches to mitigating the risk of leaking underground storage tanks (a problem with the fantastic acronym LUST).   Large fines for spills, as it turns out, are not a particularly efficient enforcement tool, as most LUSTs are owned by small businesses like gas stations that would likely go bankrupt before paying all the fines and cleanup costs.

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Pavan Sukhdev, Head of the UNEP Green Economy Initiative, and previously Managing Director in the Global Markets Division at Deutsche Bank, has some remarkably lucid things to say about fisheries in this month's Frontiers in Ecology and Environment: "Economics is the science of scarce resources. What is scarce here as a resource is not fishing capacity – in which every year we invest more, as a result of the subsidies that are targeted largely at the bigger fleets and the trawler fleets.

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