New US office takes fresh approach to carbon

“To have the Agriculture Department and Forest Service make a major commitment to ... addressing global warming represents a major sea change,” says Charles Gauvin, an environmental attorney and president of the conservation group Trout Unlimited. “This is incredibly timely and consistent with what candidate Obama said he would do. The fact that it is occurring so quickly is indicative of how a concept can be translated into practical reality.”

In fact, the new USDA office was launched in the waning days of the Bush administration.

“For the ecosystem service concept to generate real results, it will have to go beyond valuing ecosystem services to actually contracting for them,” says Terry Anderson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Mont., a free-market economist who advocates resource protection based on economic incentives rather than government regulation.

“Just as the Forest Service produces trees and sells them to loggers or produces recreational services and sells them through its fee programs to hikers, it will have to think of itself as a supplier of ecosystem services for sale to those who value them.”

But environmental economist Ray Rasker is wary. “Incentives matter, but disincentives matter, too,” says Mr. Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman. “I believe in providing economic incentives for companies and landowners that do extraordinary things, but you can get results much more cheaply and effectively by penalizing polluters who put out CO2.”

In its recent “State of the World” report for 2009, the Worldwatch Institute in Washington calls for the use of economic incentives for landowners so that they manage their holdings for maximum absorption of carbon generated by agriculture, industry, and automobiles. But it says, “This calls for forging unusual political coalitions that link consumers, producers, industry, investors, environmentalists, and communicators.”

In any case, how natural resources are economically valued – especially for the environmental services they provide – is headed into largely uncharted waters.

Mark Nechodom, a senior Forest Service climate-change policy expert working with Collins, says the change of administrations, interest from businesses, and public awareness has pushed the issue past a “tipping point.”

“One of the things that has struck people who have been around the climate-change issue is the rapidity with which the move to a market-based solution has cascaded forward,” he says.

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