Lucy Emerton

• Environment Management Group

The 2020 global spatial targets for protected areas set by the Convention on Biological Diversity have almost been achieved, but management effectiveness remains deficient. Personnel shortages are widely cited as major contributing factors but have not previously been quantified. Using data from 176 countries and territories, we estimate a current...

Ecosystems play a potentially important role in sustainably reducing the risk of disaster events worldwide. Yet, to date, there are few comprehensive studies that summarize the state of knowledge of ecosystem services and functions for disaster risk reduction. This paper builds scientific evidence through a review of 529 English-language articles p...

An important strategy for meeting global landscape restoration goals is nursery production of high-quality seedlings. Growing seedlings with attributes that promote post-planting survival and growth can be dramatically influenced by the nursery container system. In many countries, nurseries produce seedlings in polybags filled with excavated soil....

Ecosystems provide essential services that form the basis of human well-being. Climate change-induced losses and damages to ecosystem services (l&d-ES) thus have significant impacts on societies. Yet, little of the work on losses and damages (l&d) has focused on ecosystem services. Also in international climate negotiations, where the debate emerge...

There is widespread concern that funding for protected and conserved areas (PCAs) will decline substantially due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic outcomes. This paper makes the case that the impacts of the global crisis do not in themselves introduce novel financial threats to PCAs; rather, they serve to magnify, intensify and exacerba...

In this white paper, we seek to clarify the definition and role of conservation finance to show how important its mechanisms and strategies are for addressing the underlying causes of nature loss as well as contributing to increasing sustainable funding flows to nature conservation. This white paper is intended to improve understanding of the oppor...

This paper deals with the important topic of improving financing biodiversity conservation. As well as explaining key terms, concepts and principles, it proposes a series of strategic and practical steps to diagnose, respond to and deliver sustainable financing solutions. This approach is driven by the need to ensure that efforts to improve biodive...

Land degradation is a critical challenge to sustainable development. This paper examines factors that shape farmer decision-making around sustainable land management (SLM) practices in Tanzania and Malawi. It seeks to understand the contradictions that often exist between what research recommends, projects promote and donors invest in and what SLM...

Despite the large amount of time and effort spent on developing Protected Area (PA) management plans, many never get implemented due to a lack of funds. All too commonly, PA managers are unable even to cover the costs of essential infrastructure, equipment, maintenance and operations. In many cases, as well as suffering from a lack of finances, PAs...

Myanmar is one of the mangrove‐richest countries in the world, providing valuable ecosystem services to people. However, due to deforestation driven primarily by agricultural expansion, Myanmar's mangrove forest cover has declined dramatically over the past few decades, while what remains is still under pressure. To support management planning, acc...

Total economic value (TEV) is one of the most widely used and commonly accepted frameworks for classifying wetland economic benefits and for attempting to integrate them into decision-making. Its major innovation is that, rather than just considering commercial or extractive values, TEV also takes into account subsistence and nonmarket values, ecol...

he South-East Europe 2020 Strategy sets out an ambitious agenda for attaining the levels of socioeconomic growth that are required to improve prosperity and facilitate integration with the European Union. Yet, although one of the five core pillars of SEE20 is sustainable growth, scant attention is paid to the dependence of these development prospec...

Between 2014-15, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) carried out a strategic review of protected area (PA) financing status, needs and options in Myanmar. This included a review of past and current PA expenditures, revenues and funding sources (see Emerton et al. 2015). It investigated actual budget allocations and spending from FY 2010/11 – 20...

The financial resources needed for globally implementing the Aichi Biodiversity Targets have been estimated at US$ 150–440 billion per year (CBD COP11, 2012) – of which only a fraction is currently available. Significant efforts have been undertaken in many countries to increase funding for biodiversity conservation. Nonetheless, this funding short...

This document reports on the economic value of key ecosystem services in the Bogani, Lore Lindu and Tangkoko landscapes. It seeks to provide an economic and business case for enhanced investment in these three protected areas (PAs), as well as demonstrating a methodology that can be applied to other PAs in Sulawesi. The study was carried out by the...

This sourcebook addresses the topic of valuing the costs, benefits and impacts of Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) measures, in comparison (and combination) with grey measures. It combines information on valuation theory and methods with 40 real-world examples, as well as, practical steps for commissioning, designing and implementing EbA valuation...

This paper focuses on the upper portion of the Tana River Basin: the mixed forest-agricultural landscape on the south-east slopes of the Aberdare Range and south-west slopes of Mount Kenya, which occupies the watershed for the tributaries that enter the Tana River upstream of the Seven Forks hydropower scheme. It investigates on-farm sustainable la...

Key messages: • Financial resource mobilisation needs to go hand in hand with efforts to slow the drivers of conservation costs and to improve effective spending capacity. • Constraints to financial sustainability of biodiversity conservation are highly diverse and need to be better understood at country level. • Innovative financing mechanisms can...

Total economic value (TEV) is one of the most widely used and commonly accepted frameworks for classifying wetland economic benefits and for attempting to integrate them into decision-making. Its major innovation is that, rather than just considering commercial or extractive values, TEV also takes into account subsistence and nonmarket values, ecol...

Even though ‘green’ options for addressing the impacts of climate change have gained in currency over recent years, they are yet to be fully mainstreamed into development policy and practice. One important reason is the lack of economic evidence as to why investing in ecosystems offers a cost-effective, equitable and sustainable means of securing c...

Economic instruments that promise “win-win” solutions for both biodiversity conservation and human livelihoods have become increasingly popular over recent years. There however remains a gap in terms of practical and policy-relevant guidance about appropriate approaches that take into account the local needs and the specific cultural, legal, and ec...

The Evaluating Land Management Options (ELMO) tool uses participatory techniques to assist in the selection, planning and evaluation of sustainable land management (SLM) interventions. ELMO has been developed to overcome the gaps in current socioeconomic and biophysical research methods, which describe and classify the effects of land degradation a...

The study was motivated by the apparent contradictions that exist between what research recommends, projects promote and donors invest in as being the most effective sustainable land management (SLM) options, and those which farmers actually carry out. It contends that much of the received wisdom and many of the commonly used assumptions that guide...

The first section of the document reports on a strategic review carried out to support the development of a sustainable finance strategy for Myanmar’s PA network. It assesses financing status, trends, constraints and opportunities. The aim is to identify needs, niches and entry points for strengthening PA financial sustainability, to be discussed w...

Mangrove forests are under global pressure. Habitat destruction and degradation persist despite longstanding recognition of the important ecological functions of mangroves. Hence new approaches are needed to help stakeholders and policy-makers achieve sound management that is informed by the best science. Here we explore how the new policy concept...

Acknowledgements: This synthesis report complements the 'ValuES collection of case studies: Experiences with ecosystem service assessment processes'. It would not have been possible without the willingness of experts and practitioners to share their inside views of assessment processes with the research team of the ValuES project: Cross are gratefu...

Practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, land management, and biodiversity conservation are increasingly interested in using economic instruments that promise “win-win” solutions for conservation and human livelihoods. However, practitioners often lack guidance for selecting and implementing suitable economic approaches that take the...

This document reports on a study carried out under the auspices of the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem (BOBLME) Project. Its objective was to assess the economic value of marine and coastal ecosystem services in the Bay of Bengal. By so doing, it sought to demonstrate both the economic benefits provided by healthy marine and coastal ecosystems...

There are many different approaches to, and methods for, doing an assessment. This online navigator guides through possible purposes for doing an assessment before suggesting a sub-set from the 60+ method profiles available online. Diverse scoping tools, and qualitative, quantative and monetary assessment methods are being covered. Profiles come wi...

The International Conference on Policy Mixes in Environmental and Conservation Policies was held in cooperation with the European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) and took place at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, Germany, 25–27 February 2014. The conference brought together the participants from the EU FP 7...

The iCoast project 'understanding the fiscal and regulatory mechanisms necessary to achieve CCD in the coastal zone' is funded by the Climate & Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) and carried out by Edinburgh Napier University, LTS International, Birmingham University, Ruhuna University in Sri Lanka and Kenya Marine and Fisheries Institute, in col...

Payments for marine and coastal ecosystem services (PCMES) offer a way of “capturing” ecosystem service values and internalising them into people’s land and resource use decisions. They respond to, and attempt to remedy, the persistent undervaluation of ecosystem services in the policies, prices and markets that drive economic activities. In turn,...

The Maha Oya is one of Sri Lanka’s major rivers, and flows into the western coast of the country. It has been a source of sand, clay and water for many decades. However, over recent years, clay and sand mining have increased, to meet the rapidly growing construction demands of the country. These mining activities, carried out both legally and illeg...

In principle at least, chainsaw logging is disallowed under Liberia's 2006 National Forestry Reform Law. In practice, it has however been accorded a quasi-legal status, and remains an active and growing industry in the country. This reflects the reality that chainsaw logging currently provides the only source of domestic timber supply in Liberia, a...

The lucrative, illegal trade in tigers (Panthera tigris) remains a major conservation problem. Tiger farming has been proposed as a potential solution, with farmed tigers substituting for wild tigers. At first glance, this argument's logic seems simple: farming will increase the supply of tigers, prices will fall, and poaching will no longer be pro...

This document reports on a study carried out under the auspices of the World Bank and the Government of Mongolia. The goal of the study was to improve understanding about the economic value of the Upper Tuul ecosystem for Ulaanbaatar's water supplies, and how this might be affected by different land and resource management options in the future. At...

Ecosystem under-valuation has long been a persistent problem in water planning and decision-making. Balance sheets have rarely tallied up the economic benefits that ecosystems provide for water quality and supply, or recognised that there is a tangible return to investing in their conservation. At the same time the economic costs, losses and opport...

This paper addresses the need to factor ecosystem values into coastal development planning. It contends that the economic calculations that underpin coastal development decisions remain flawed, and fundamentally incomplete, because they omit an important set of costs and benefits — the values associated with ecosystem goods and services. From an ec...

as water infrastructure This practical guide explains the most important techniques for the economic valuation of eco-system services, and how their results are best incorporated in policy and decision-making. It explains, step by step, how to generate persuasive arguments for more sustainable and equitable development decisions in water resources...

This paper argues that undervaluation of tropical forest ecosystems has discriminated against their sustainable management. Forest environmental benefits have long been underemphasized or ignored altogether by planners and decision-makers because they are so hard to value, and because many lie outside formal markets and pricing mechanisms. Using tr...

South and South East Asia harbour some of the world's richest biodiversity and contain more than 1,500 Protected Areas (PAs), which together cover more than 760,000 km 2 or 8.5% of total land area. Yet establishing and running a national PA network is not a cost-free exercise, and finding sufficient funds to cover these costs is proving to be a maj...

ver the last decade the Kenyan economy has declined as demonstrated by GDP growth rates. Interest rates have fallen, exchange rates remained stable and inflation held down, while private sector investment and employment has grown. Overall, this gives a positive picture of economic growth prospects. When we look more closely at this encouraging econ...

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is one of the global conventions on environmental conservation that came out of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By signing and ratifying the CBD, countries have agreed to support its goals and aims. The three main objectives of the CBD are the conservation...

This paper examines the economics of wildlife tourism in Africa. It demonstrates that as well as generating large revenues for governments, wildlife tourism makes significant contributions to other national economic goals such as foreign exchange earnings and employment creation. It supports a range of private entrepreneurs, both in the tourism sec...