 At this point I'm pleased to introduce our next speaker Gretchen Daly, the founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project and the Bing Professor of Environmental Science at Stanford University. The title of her talk is Accounting for Natural Capital from Demonstration to Transformation. Well I want to say first off I'm really grateful to have been invited. This has been a tremendous workshop and I've learned a ton and really appreciated the many realms of expertise that people have been putting forth to sort of stimulate this conversation about what we can do in the realm of natural climate solutions and in harmony with the much bigger picture instead of goals we're trying to achieve some of the toughest goals humanity has ever pursued. So I love the quote you ended with Joe from Martin Luther King on good science being compassionate science and in that spirit I'd love to dive in. I'll try to connect a bit with the presentations made over the past couple of days and just lay out the arena that was put forth to me namely how do we account for natural capital how do we value nature essentially in decision making and how can we move especially what I'd like to address a bit here is from demonstration at relatively small scales so the scales are certainly increasing impressively but whether it's fast enough it's a big question so how do we move from demonstration to real system-wide transformation in harmonizing people and nature. So I'd like to just hit on the key frontiers and basically my take-homes that are number one there's been this massive science advances over the past decade or two in this arena especially in the past 10 years new science new data allowing us to run calculations that were undreamed of before and looking at sort of a return on investment in nature's benefits to people and in economic security and recovery with really targeted approaches so we need to enhance use of this data and science to better target our investments in scaling there is a lot of deep experience on which we can build much of which remains still kind of little known and poorly shared between countries and regions and the institutions implementing it so another arena in which we could accelerate is in scaling success and third and excuse me finally I'd like to emphasize the tremendous need to come up with new metrics that let us track performance whether it's of policies or the entities meant to implement and evaluate them there are also some really promising advances being made here that we urgently need to integrate much more widely into for example the climate conversations we're having today so the overarching questions when we think about you know achieving climate security especially through natural climate solutions in the context of all the pressures on land and on kind of the earth system broadly three that really come to the floor are you know how much and where should we be protecting ecosystems and in what ways second how can we harmonize people in nature and specifically how can we secure nature through conservation and restoration and at the same time secure human livelihoods then third how can we move beyond GDP as the dominant metric that is so fundamental in many key realms of decision making so just to tie in a little bit to the past couple of days a couple of presenters and then Sarah you nicely summed up this morning sort of noting the tremendous potential for natural climate solutions shown here to help drive the reduction in emissions and actually you know reverse all that in the near term but also the many constraints that we face and the worries over massive shifts in land use that might trigger other dramatic problems economic social political as well as just the biophysical challenges of providing enough food to energy access and other fundamental sort of human needs so if we look further at this paper the nice analysis by griscombe and others this also was shown in the past couple days there are these sort of climate mitigation pathways involving different ecosystem types on the left forest ag lands pasture lands grasslands broadly wetlands and the analysis focused on their climate mitigation potential and then there's this little box down at the bottom and these little tiny bars on the left of the vertical axis showing what the other benefits might be and what I'd now like to dive into with those questions we have in mind like of starting with you know where and how much to protect let's look at those other sort of co-benefits that would come along with these strategies how do we estimate you know how much to protect in the way of for example let's just get into land you know where do we draw the line between let's say agricultural lands and tropical forest lands how much in any different you know region or country would we need to protect in what in some sense would be optimal under different let's use Martin Luther King's criterion you know a compassionate at the same time realistic equitable kind of approach what about with biodiversity you know which elements of biodiversity are likely to survive a human impact how can we foster those that are most important to human well-being and hopefully also in some broader ethical dimensions whether it's bees for pollination the vast majority of our you know nutrition really comes from the fruits nuts veggies and other pollinated crops that we grow there's tremendous benefits provided by birds like this pair of royal flycatchers that conduct natural pest control then there's things that we've just got to be a lot more aware of here's a big pest control agents in the middle this fabulous largest bat that's carnivorous in the new world spectral bat yet so it goes around eating those flycatchers also a lot of insects and things but we know that many of our serious diseases come from bats and biodiversity isn't 100 of positive things we've got to be much more aware and sophisticated when it comes to our analyses and plans for manipulating biodiversity and understanding where we really need to protect to minimize the kind of disruption that we're facing now with the global pandemic and finally just touching on water here looking at a wonderful expanse of the Amazon up into the highlands in Ecuador we know that forest plays a crucial role in many dimensions of water supply whether it's storage and flows for drinking irrigation and hydropower or flood control protection of downstream communities and property or famously for the Amazon but also for many other forest systems a powerful influence on atmospheric circulation of water and on precipitate sorry precipitation patterns in many regions that could be severely disrupted with widespread further deforestation so how do we think about all of this in an integrated way what we really want to know here taking kind of an economic production function approach teeing up Larry Goulder in a minute maybe is you know what kind of implications would come from alternative changes in management or policy on the left such as a decision to restore habitat and maybe reduce some of the cropland area changing ecosystem structure protecting stream side habitat to improve this ecosystem function of water filtration and retention to improve let's say in a region like California or in much of Asia where you have precipitation just in certain parts of the year water retention and meeting it out for irrigation hydropower and drinking year-round and improving water quality leading to many benefits including and now I can't quite see what's on my far right but reduced treatment costs and other benefits to people so what we want to be able to do is conduct this kind of analysis in a lot of different arenas these arenas are shown here you know everything with climate security up there very prominently as an overarching arena encompassing coastal climate protection urban cooling food production flood control just water and energy production broadly and then various aspects of health many other types and sort of classes of benefits that we want to be able to analyze in an integrated way to know how much and where to protect and how to harmonize across all of these in some ways competing objectives for the land and other resources across earth's surface so there's been a large community that's developed models in each of these areas some for you know in traditions going back decades in some arenas especially in water modeling and other parts of the system food and agricultural modeling other areas such as mental health especially very new or some elements of say modeling food production and agricultural systems like in pollination services from nature pest control services being very new all of these are being integrated through the natural capital project into a sort of modeling a data and modeling software platform for integrated valuation of ecosystem or environmental services and trade-offs and this is being widely used mostly well in a number of realms across most countries still I'd say a long way to go to mainstream this kind of approach but I'll show you some of the most powerful examples actually driving this into planning and practice today so the idea is to take all the data that are streaming in through different sensing technologies take these questions and the new understanding we have in science of the values of nature embedded for example here within agricultural systems and using the software to inform decisions and drive real impact in changing land management and the financing thereof to make it all basically possible to harmonize kind of people and nature so here's an example run for IPFS the IPCC for biodiversity and ecosystem services but it's just recently been set up and delivered its first assessment report in 2019 and what I want to emphasize here it's a lot of maps but the point is if you look across the top there's three services of about 18 that were modeled that really operate on a very fine scale and now for the first time thanks to these advances in the technology and the data streams coming in and the modeling by many many groups worldwide in many of these arenas we can model at a very fine scale things such as water quality regulation, coastal risk reduction by mangroves, seagrass, beds, coral reefs and such and crop pollination by you know little bees and other types of insects primarily so it's quite a major improvement in our ability to project you know what the benefits are being provided across the world under current conditions what populations are most vulnerable or exposed and have the greatest need for nature's contributions so that you can see where people's greatest needs line up with nature's greatest potential contributions and make forecasts aligned with the IPCC's type of forecast for the future I won't get into that further now but what I'd like to do is kind of just emphasize that we can do this at very fine scales anywhere in the world now even in quite data poor regions there are enough data to link the human and some aspects of the economic and social dimensions of a place with the provision of these benefits of nature and project the implications of alternative decisions or development plan so I'm going to show you a couple of examples now and we'll emphasize Latin America and China so there I'd say thousands of examples now worldwide those shown here really demonstrate at scale an impressive scale how to integrate this understanding into investments and so Costa Rica really kicked it all off it's a famous case probably most of you are familiar with it so I'll start there just going back to 1997 with just some really brilliant innovative leaders of the country at the time including Alvaro Mania and setting up the first national payment system worldwide for the provision of these benefits or ecosystem services and paying people through a variety of financial payment streams some international from European investments in a trial period back then others domestic and a lot of this is really run through a fuel tax on petroleum in the country even as they're trying to decarbonize so they're trying to figure out where else they'll get the revenue or the draw the investment from but paying people to secure climate purify water provide a range of biodiversity benefits in farmland and secure scenic beauty for tourism all of these kind of major parts of the economy and this is one component of the dramatic turnaround that Costa Rica made from having the highest deforestation rate in the world to today a net reforestation so let's touch briefly on the Caribbean in particular where I know we're not focusing so much on climate adaptation but where you know that's the name of the game these days sadly and where there's been dramatic shift in mindset and in planning using these types of tools to look at the coastal climate protection that could come from restoring habitats or at least protecting existing habitat and being mindful of those habitats that protect people and property from storms when developing country or regional development plans that integrate across you know many sectors transportation other infrastructure to urban systems tourism mining forestry the whole bit all of this is being quite integrated I'm showing a a tiny example in geographic terms but one that's been very influential given all of the tragic damage that's been sustained in the Bahamas and particularly on this island Andros Island and that's now really informing together with similar work in other countries in the Caribbean and Latin America more broadly an investment by the Inter-American Development Bank in this approach across 26 countries just integrate this science and understanding into development planning and fund development plans that are climate resilient and finally I'm going to turn too briefly to China that I'm going to show very rapidly just a dramatic transformation in policy and in the science and capacity needed to implement these policies toward a green financial system this comes after you know many decades of very impressive GDP growth that listed about 850 million people out of poverty that came at a tremendous cost environmentally so recently the government has added the ecological dimension of the nation as a major pillar amongst five pillars in total of national development and supporting this the country has developed by far and away in the most sophisticated assessment of its ecosystems and I'll just show a few slides that show the incredible detail by with which they're able now to analyze the stocks of natural capital that provide these benefits and the flow of services from these different ecosystem types to people here the services are shown and it was found that over the past the years from 2000 to 2010 that there was actually an improvement in all of these services thanks to the major investments that started being made in environmental protection in China around the turn of the century following devastating flooding that was traced to deforestation the one area where there's been a continuing decline is biodiversity conservation so the country has responded to all of this by zoning land and declaring sort of priority benefits or stocks of natural capital like biodiversity for restoration and is targeting payments to 200 million people today to conserve and restore ecosystems across the country there's a lot of detail we could get into here it sort of looks like this in any given place every square meter of basically the entire country has now been zoned from both a kind of top-down approach with the central government declaring national priorities that do include carbon sequestration by the way but they focus more directly on the locally and regionally delivered and consumed services and also through a bottom-up process they're setting out a whole new massive national park system and in paying people really looking at the social dimensions of the elderly populations that are left in many rural areas and in urban areas really getting to Rob Jackson said something the other day about just inspiring people and raising awareness and trying to drive public support for these major investments across the cities at today starting with these priority cities and then just to close I'll end saying that China is really moving past GDP it looks like it's all yet to be seen but they've pioneered a way of developing a parallel system of accounts for ecosystems to quantify and track change through time in gross ecosystem product that looks at the value of all the goods and services supplied across the country and at many scales in a year so drawing in data from all those different sources across the country running them keeping tabs on the actual stocks of natural capital but looking at the flows of services through this modeling and then in red you know revealing the contribution of ecosystems to the economy and society broadly informing these major financial compensation programs that are underway that involve paying so a city will pay upwind and upstream and other things regions that supply services whether it's you know air and water quality or food and just water supply or soil conservation and other things and then finally evaluating the performance of policies leaders and investments so I'll close here just bringing us back to these opportunities to scale and emphasizing that there's a lot of traction through the major multilateral development banks and big question is how else to partner at a higher system-wide scale now to drive standardization of some of these approaches and really you know aiming to mainstream much more powerfully than has been achieved to date thank you. Thank you Gretchen we've got the questions piling up so I'm going to hand it over to Jenny. Thank you Sarah and thank you Gretchen it was a lovely presentation we'd like to go to Jessica Hinojosa sorry for the mispronunciation there but Jessica when you're ready please unmute yourself and ask your question. Sure great thank you and thanks Gretchen for for a really really fascinating presentation. My question is kind of around government buy-in and you know with with getting governments to kind of agree on the value of natural capital and be willing to invest in it you know I've seen things before that say that sometimes actually autocratic leaders or leaders in countries where there's long longer election cycles might be more willing to adopt some of these practices because they can actually see the decadal scale change or their return on investment I'm just curious on your perspective on that and especially you know being US based you know do shorter election cycles make it harder for government officials to be willing to invest in natural capital? I think you've put your finger on something important but I'd also say there there's so many other factors that it's hard to it for me to see very insightfully into where the greatest potential is for driving the political shifts that we need so what that's where working with the development banks has actually been very powerful because they come in with a public facing mission they're tightly they have very good access to finance ministers prime ministers and others and they bring money with them and so many of these development banks have been pioneering relatively small to medium scale demonstrations very successfully and then I think the the public's kind of learning about it as this happens and it's all really over the past very few years you know three to four years so in a way this change is happening at light speed relative to the normal rate of cultural evolution but how to bring it here how to bring it here is a crucial question and I'd say we've had quite a bit of traction at the state level but since the past over the past four years obviously no real traction at the national level in the US but thanks for that insight I'm sure you've got your finger on something important there lovely thank you and if we have time for one more question I'd like to go to Shafiq Jeffery Shafiq hi Gretchen thank you for the presentation I was curious how can we kind of validate some of these models because it's quite complex coupling across them and to be sure that we're actually taking the right actions how do you foresee that I mean obviously this is still very early stages so yeah you're raising a very good question there's been like I referenced really briefly a tremendous amount of work in some areas and then going back to Rob Jackson and Chris Field they both referenced a lot of work on the interactions of carbon and water in forest systems in particular and what you're trading off under different scenarios so there's some arenas where long predating this effort to integrate at all we have some good understanding of the interactions and such but there are other areas where like you say we are just at the beginning of a really advancing the science and approach and basically it's just going to take more time with a high emphasis on the worries that I think you're pointing to that you know we might get it wrong and that's certainly the question you raise is a really important and central one but I I think beyond focusing on it working harder and trying to implement some of this and track progress that's probably the best we can do thank you