The Massachusetts Ocean Partnership is developing and applying several tools to support decision making during the implementation of and updates to the Massachusetts Ocean Management Plan.  The tools include the Cumulative Impacts model and an ecosystem services tradeoff model developed by the University of California at Santa Barbara, the MIMES ecosystem service model developed by the University of Vermont and Boston University, and the MIDAS decision support interface developed by Boston University.  This webinar will provide an overview of these tools, why they were selected, a demonstration of draft and final products, and how they are being applied in Massachusetts.  We will also provide some lessons and recommendations for their continued development and potential application within the marine spatial planning context.  Learn more about the Massachusetts Ocean Partnership and its work at http://massoceanpartnership.org/.  

In September, AFORDable Futures co-facilitated sessions during a series of REDD+ workshops supported by USAID, Forest Trends and the UN REDD Coordination in Goma,  the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Workshops covered feasibility analysis, carbon revenue calculations, social impact assessment, and the Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Alliance's (CCB) standards.  For more details, read on the Forest Trends website.

A recording of the MIMES demonstration - conducted March 15, 2011 for EBM Tools - is now available for download. 

You can get the .wmv file from the EBM webpage.

The MIMES is presented as one of nine decision support tools for marine spatial planning in this new guide from the Center for Ocean Solutions. To download the PDF, follow this link.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convened this workshop to facilitate the use of integrated modeling to inform and improve local, regional and national policy decisions relevant to climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. The workshop purpose was to:

• Bring together empirical scientists, modelers, economists, social scientists, and public policy experts to help ensure that model development aligns with climate change policy design, management and decision-making needs.
• Connect the climate change data producers with the climate change data users.  Make existing resources accessible to stakeholders in the field.
• Highlight successful case studies of intra-agency, inter-agency, academy, public, and private sector systems analysis and integrated modeling for climate change impacts.

Visit the website and read the workshop report.

Some good new from the National Wildlife Federation on abandoning GDP as the most important measure of our economy; and some excellent (as always) words from David Korten on learning from the biosphere in structuring our economy.  Read more.

Puma is looking at both the impact of its direct operations and its supply chain, and plans to issue an environmental profit and loss statement based on its findings. The company commissioned the help of Trucost and PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Because the concept of ecosystem services covers such a wide swath, investigating one's impacts on ecosystems and also tying a value to those impacts poses a huge challenge to companies, especially for those that are already struggling with getting greenhouse gas emission data from their suppliers. The benefits to companies, though, can be just as big as the undertaking needed to measure them. A company can be better positioned to alter its most damaging work and even improve other aspects of its supply chain to boost the value of ecosystems it operates in. Such work can also ensure a company secures access to the services it needs — like clean water — for years to come. Read more.

"Value: Counting Ecosystems as Water Infrastructure" offered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is a practical guide explaining the most important techniques for the economic valuation of ecosystem services, and how their results are best incorporated in policy and decision-making. The guide explains, step by step, how to generate persuasive arguments for more sustainable and equitable development decisions in water resources management.  Read more.

Read a review of "Accounting for Sustainability" a report summarizing results from a five-year project supported by Prince Charles of England.  The goal of the project was to determine the feasibility of factoring industries’ impact on the environment into their economic spreadsheets.  Read the full article here.

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