New research: policy instruments
To date there has been very little thought as to how policies might be better crafted to address multiple ecosystem services and minimise some of the trade-offs inherent in these decisions.
A policy guidance document produced by Landcare Research’s Suzie Greenhalgh and colleague Mindy Selman, ‘Review of Policy Instruments for Ecosystem Services’, examines the types of policy instruments that decision-makers can use when considering options and approaches to enhance, protect or maintain the suite of services provided by ecosystems. They include instruments covering:
- Outreach and education—including public awareness, access to information, and environmental education. These policies can take many forms and could be displayed on web portals, maps, interactive tools, awareness campaigns, or in regularly published documents. Messages need to easily understood.
- Regulatory approaches—including bans and restrictions, permits, environmental standards, and environmental limits and caps. These approaches operate on the premise that a penalty will be incurred if individual sources of ecosystem degradation fail to comply with prescribed levels of pollution, abatement, or ecosystem quality, or fail to adopt the prescribed means of reducing damage.
- Economic instruments—including price-based instruments like taxes, fees and levies, subsidies, tax credits, and low-interest loans, and market-based instruments such as eco-labelling, environmental markets, and auctions and tenders. Economic instruments supplement or substitute for standalone regulatory approaches, providing entities with incentives (usually financial) to change their behaviour and thereby reduce their impact on the environment. Dr Greenhalgh’s document outlines two categories of economic instruments: price-based and market-based (or rights-based) instruments.
- Ecosystem preservation and restoration—including protected areas, ecosystem restoration, land purchases, and stewardship agreements. Ecosystem preservation and restoration policies protect or restore portions of the landscape to maintain or restore ecosystems and their services.
Dr Greenhalgh’s research considers examples of where and how these policies have been applied, the strengths and weaknesses of the different policy approaches, and how these policies might be adapted to look more broadly at ecosystem services.
However, she says to support policies that are responsive to multiple ecosystem services and designed to minimise trade-offs, decision-makers must also reinforce and increase monitoring and modelling efforts to identify the most efficient policy instrument(s) but also to track policy performance.
In addition, policies cannot be effective without the appropriate institutions and authorities to effectively implement them.
Supporting implementation of policy instruments: research, monitoring and evaluation
Dr Greenhalgh says research, monitoring, and evaluation activities complement the implementation of any policy instrument by:
- providing information on the status, trend and condition of ecosystem services
- identifying the drivers of ecosystem service change
- providing information and tools to inform policy development, and
- establishing effective measures and monitoring programmes to track how policy and related processes impact and depend on various ecosystem services, and to adaptively manage the policies implemented.
Implementing policy: institutions and governance
Policies will be ineffective without the appropriate institutions and authorities to implement them. Decision-makers should consider whether appropriate institutions exist to administer the policies or implement the actions, whether there is institutional capacity and capability to enact and enforce the policies, and whether there is suitable transparency and accountability in existing institutions to ensure that policies are supported by the communities on which they impact. Missing or weak capacity issues should be addressed prior to implementing these policies.
Selecting appropriate policy instruments
It is unlikely that a single policy will provide the solution to complex environmental problems involving multiple ecosystem services. Rather, a mix of policy instruments is likely necessary. In many instances, the policy instruments currently in use have been designed to focus on individual ecosystem services. This silo approach can sometimes have unintended negative impacts on other ecosystem services. When choosing an instrument the wider impacts on ecosystem services should be determined and the subsequent design of policy should reflect these wider ecosystem services impacts.
Conclusions
Environmental and ecosystem degradation and the decline of many of our ecosystem services are becoming increasingly recognised by governments, industry and the general public. Dr Greenhalgh’s document is useful for identifying the types of instruments a decision-maker may like to investigate and how these can be compared. The systematic assessment of how decisions impact on multiple ecosystem services and the wise choice and design of policy instruments will reduce the likelihood of unintended policy impacts, providing a solid platform from which to halt and reverse the decline of many of our ecosystem services.