Impact Assessment
Behind the rhetoric what is really being done to combat desertification?
In The Independent, Nora Berrahmouni, a forestry officer for FAO and Michele Bozzano, forestry researcher at Bioversity International, point out that for the Green Wall project to succeed, "you need to plant the right [tree] species in the right place" and involve and benefit local communities and help change the belief that taking care of the environment is a luxury.
Genes are gems for food security
Risk management in the face of climate change is something we can all learn from smallholder farmers. As climate change stalks global agriculture, researchers should collaborate with smallholder farmers in enhancing the diversification of crops to ensure food security, says Emile Frison, Director General of Bioversity International.
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Figure 1 - Click to enlarge
Outputs coming from Bioversity’s research are diverse; so too are the pathways that connect these outputs to disseminated outcomes that subsequently generate a change.
Overall, the changes brought about through Bioversity’s research activities manifest themselves in the different ways that agricultural biodiversity can be used to improve human well-being in general, and livelihoods in particular (See figure 1 - click to enlarge).
Figure 2 - Click to enlarge
The goods and services that humans derive from agricultural biodiversity are varied and intricate. For example, a diversity of foods needed for a balanced diet; both foods and agricultural practices with a wide array of cultural significance; genetic diversity for adaptation to heterogeneous and variable environments; the ability to manage agricultural pests and diseases.
This complexity and diversity are reflected in the fact that agricultural biodiversity generates many different types of benefits, and hence types of value, for humankind (Figure 2).
Figure 3 - click to enlarge
These goods and services, as well as their associated benefits, have different economic properties that affect how they are used and managed. These have to do with the extent to which their use by one agent reduces (or not) their availability to another (known as rivalry) and the extent to which one agent can (or cannot) exclude others from using or benefiting from the good or service (excludability). The combination of these two properties, rivalry and excludability, creates four categories of goods and services that define how their benefits are accessed and managed by society (Figure 3).
In principle, private goods and benefits can usually be allocated efficiently by markets. However, due to transaction costs or information asymmetries, this is not always the case. Public goods and services (either common or public ) are usually misallocated by markets, creating major externalities, i.e. uncompensated impacts of one agent’s actions over the welfare of another. Externalities can be positive or negative depending on whether the impact of the actions of the former increases or decreases the welfare of the latter.
An example of a negative externality associated with agricultural biodiversity is the fact that highly developed markets tend to create strong incentives to specialize in the most profitable crop or variety. This in turn creates extremely uniform crop stands in space and time that translate into high vulnerability to pest and disease outbreaks, which affect those who profit from the uniformity, but also affects consumers who, through no fault of their own, will have a less reliable food supply. Many of the goods and services provided by agricultural biodiversity are public and in numerous cases even those that are private may not be allocated efficiently by markets, creating very strong negative externalities for society.
Since markets are poor at valuing many of the benefits of agricultural biodiversity, market prices tend to underestimate their worth, leading to poor allocation decisions, which can result in a lower current or future supply of these benefits than is socially optimal. Through research and interventions, an important role of Bioversity and its partners is to contribute to documenting and correcting these negative externalities.
A further complication is that the benefits of agricultural biodiversity occur at different scales, from the local to the global, and these scales are linked, but sometimes in complex ways. For example, the costs and benefits of using and conserving agricultural biodiversity may be distributed differently across scales. There tends to be a spatial mismatch between conservation costs and benefits.
Economic benefits tend to be limited on a local scale, increase somewhat on a national scale and can be substantial on a global scale. On the other hand, costs, in terms of foregone development opportunities, tend to be locally significant and nationally and globally moderate. Tracing impact from one scale to another presents particular problems that require rethinking or adapting existing methodologies or creating new ways of approaching the assessment of impact across scales. This is one of the main thrusts of the impact assessment system Bioversity is developing. Cost-benefit analyses, which are traditionally used to analyze allocation decisions and evaluate alternative investments, also present problems for Bioversity because many of the benefits generated by the organization, such as the conservation of biodiversity or the development of methods to empower communities to manage their genetic resources more effectively, cannot be as easily measured and monetized as increases in yield or efficiency in input use.
The application of both cost-benefit and cost effectiveness analyses to Bioversity’s work hence presents important methodological challenges that require further research, particularly on economic valuation of the benefits of agricultural biodiversity, an area of research currently being developed.
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This work by Bioversity International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
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