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When Gretchen Daily wasyoung, she watchedacid rain slowly killingthe forests around her

in Germanys Taunus mountains. Asa researcher, she cut her teeth study-ing extinctions under Paul Ehrlich,an ecologist famed for his predictions of massstarvation. Last month, Daily travelled to Japanin advance of next years meeting of the Conven-

tion on Biodiversity in Nagoya, where the worldwill hear how spectacularly that treaty has failedto protect the planets species. All this makes itremarkable that Daily is, eternally, sunny.

Dailys enthusiasm bubbles forth in meetingrooms around the globe as she promotes theecosystem-services approach to conserva-tion, of which she has become the worldsmost passionate proponent. Her argument and the argument of a group of like-mindedresearchers is that undeveloped nature pro-vides services to human society such as cleanwater and flood protection that can be valuedin financial terms that are large enough to jus-

tify protecting it (see Ready to serve). She alsobelieves that this protection can be achievedby installing sufficient financial incentives tomake owners want to preserve this bounty.

In 1997, Daily edited an influential book thatmade a first coherent case for saving the planetwith cash (Natures Services: Societal Depend-ence on Natural Ecosystems). That same year,a much-discussed paper estimated the totalworth of 17 of Earths major ecosystem serv-ices at US$33 trillion a year (R. Costanza et al.Nature387, 253260; 1997). The resultant buzzpropelled the idea into the Millennium Eco-system Assessment report of 2005, which used

ecosystem services as a framework to discussthe state of the planet and how to preserve it.Daily, now working at Stanford University in

Palo Alto, California, is gearing up for a majorpublicity push for the concept in 2010, the Inter-national Year of Biodiversity. But this increasedattention could also highlight the flaws of theecosystems-services approach, one of whichis its uncertain ability to protect biodiversity:in some cases a biodiverse ecosystem doesnot necessarily provide services that are morefinancially valuable. Not that these argumentswill stop Daily. Gretchen is going a zillionmiles an hour and shes got this crusade, if you

will, says Steve Polasky, an environmentaleconomist at the University of Minnesota,

St Paul. You often get these crusadersand it is all about them but withGretchen it is really about getting eco-system services on the agenda.

Economists have been work-ing on attaching monetary valueto components of natural systems

since at least the 1960s, evaluating the cost ofdamage caused by oil spills, for example.Butenvironmental activists and conservationists

didnt pay this work much attention. Many feltthat nature should be saved not for it price, butfor its own sake.

Dailys conversion happened gradually. Bornin the United States, she spent her adolescencein Germany in the midst of early 1980s envi-ronmental protests. It was amazing to see thedemonstrations out in the street protesting acidrain and everything connected to it, she says.The experience convinced her of the value ofusing science and activism to tackle environ-mental problems.

She did both, working at the WorldwatchInstitute, an environmental think tank in

Washington DC, as an undergraduate in themid 1980s and then applying for her graduatestudies to work with Ehrlich atStanford. At a field station inGothic, Colorado, in the early1990s, Daily mixed with Ehr-lichs influential friends. Theseincluded Peter Bing, a rich busi-nessman and then chairman ofthe board at Stanford, who knocked somesense into me on day-long hikes, says Daily,encouraging her to talk with business peo-ple in their language economics ratherthan see them as the enemy. She also met Tim

Wirth, who was then one of Colorados sena-tors and an early advocate of cap-and-tradeapproaches to combating pollution.

Daily became convinced that such incentiveschemes were the way to save the environment.

She won financial support from various foun-dations to prepare, edit and publish NaturesServices and she has hardly looked back since.There has been tremendous behind-the-scenesprogress, says Daily. The concept has beenwidely embraced by policy-makers. Ecosystem-services projects are now so thick on the groundthat one needs a dictionary to keep track of allthe acronyms. Among those that Daily salts herconversation with are TEEB (the Economics of

Ecosystems and Biodiversity), a European studyon how much money the continent might belosing through ecosystem loss, and IPBES, theIntergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity andEcosystem Services, a proposed scientific advicegenerator modelled on the IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Seeing solutionsWhen Daily is not spreading the word on eco-system services to scientists, policy-makersand broader audiences, she is pursuing herown studies in places such as Costa Rica andHawaii. In Hawaii, Daily brought together

parties who had long fought over land use ranchers, native Hawaiians and water and

power companies and per-suaded them to write a report,now under review, to the statelegislature that recommendedreforesting areas of ranchland.Daily got them all to sign up tothe same recommendations in

part by focusing on their common concernsabout land being converted to be used forhigh-end homes. Under the new proposal,the ranchers would be paid for reforesting,the native Hawaiians would have access to the

forest and the trees would retain rainwater andkeep salination of the drinking water supply atbay. It was really stunningly easy to get peopletogether in dialogue, she says. Long-time col-laborator Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of theNature Conservancy in Seattle, Washington,says of Daily that people around her are ener-gized. Shes built relationships. She just has thatpersonality. She sees a solution.

Daily focuses much of her energy on theNatural Capital Project, a joint effort she bro-kered between Stanford, the conservationgroup WWF and the Nature Conservancy. Theproject, which she co-directs, is developing a

software system to help people weigh up thevalue of land in terms of ecosystem services,

PUTTING A PRICE ON NATUREGretchen Daily knows the value of ecosystems but can ascribing financial worth to them help

to maintain biodiversity? Emma Marris meets an ecosystem-services evangelist.

A selection of natures services:

Provisioning: timber, fish, wild game, fruit

and fungus, even moss and foliage for floral

arrangements.

Regulating: water filtration and capture,

flood protection, carbon sequestration.

Cultural: recreation, education, aesthetic and

spiritual contemplation.

Ready to serve

Biodiversity

I work day and

night. Im basically

a fanatic.

Gretchen Daily

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alongside its value for building houses or otherdevelopment. Maps of an area are layered withinformation much of which can be displayedin dollars such as which parts of the land-scape are best for filtering water, where the real-estate is most valuable, where the most carbon

can be stored and where the biodiversity ishighest. Such maps could help governmentalorganizations evaluate, for example, the cost ofbuilding on land that provides free water filtra-tion if the development would then require theconstruction of a costly water plant. We canbring about this transformation if we supplytools that make it easy for decision-makers tocompare alternative scenarios, she says.

Over the past few years, the maps have beenused by officials in Chinas upper YangtzeRiver basin to help plan urban and agriculturalexpansion and dam construction. I dont earnthat much money, but I am laying down my life

for all this, Daily says. I work day and night.I am basically a fanatic.

The idea of ecosystem services has its critics.John Echeverria, an environmental lawyerat Vermont Law School in South Royalton,says that paying landowners not to damagethe environment sets up an expectation ofreward for refraining from bad behaviour,

and a financial obligation for future taxpay-ers. The implicit message of agreeing to payis that they should be entitled to proceed todestroy nature, says Echeverria. Instead, hesuggests, landowners should in general beexpected to do the right thing and be pun-ished when they dont the model enforcedby the US Endangered Species Act and equiv-alent legislation in other countries.

Daily contends that the Endangered SpeciesAct and similar lawsare failures because theirrestrictions and penalties have angered manylandowners. They also create an incentive forlandowners to remove any endangered spe-

cies from their land before the authoritiesfind out about them. This approach has led

to these past decades of loselose battles onthe environment, she says.

Richard Carson, an economist at the Univer-

sity of California, San Diego, is a fan of Dailyswork, but he says that her pitch tends to focuson the easy cases. If there is a problem, it isthat she has created the impression in peoplethat if you just think about these things in theright way, everyone is going to come out ahead.Daily agrees that she is going after the winwinsituations, and says it is because there are still somany easy gains to be made. But eventually, sheknows, there will be some tough decisions. If afish species is close to extinction, it may be nec-essary to completely close the fishery for someyears to ensure that the service (provision of fish)is maintained in the future; and it is difficult to

make that decision a win for fishermen.

Rationale for destruction?There is another fundamental limitation to theecosystem-services framework: some servicesprovided by an ecosystem are simply not con-sideredvaluable enough to warrant protecting.Biodiversity is particularly problematic. In somecases, a monotonous plain of non-native grassdelivers better and cheaper ecosystem services,measured in water filtration, carbon seques-tration and flood protection, than a diversemarsh. Attaching explicit values to things canprovide a rational basis for ignoring them.

Nevertheless, Daily says, the ecosystem-services approach can save many places withhigh biodiversity and at the very least itwill give certain ecosystems time until soci-ety shows more willingness to protect themfor other reasons. I think it is going to be along haul for biodiversity for its own sake. Forme, ecosystem services is a strategy to buytime as well as getting buy-in. Such sentimentreveals that the ecosystem-services approachis not necessarily that different from conven-tional environmentalism. Advocates of bothviewpoints believe that nature is intrinsicallyvaluable, and they hope to preserve nature by

appealing to this belief in others or, where itis absent, by creating it. The difference is thatDaily works to convince others by showingthem the profitable side of nature first.

Peering through the blur of her hecticwork life the conferences, authoring,media interviews and research it is clearthat Daily isnt just a sunny personality. She isa true optimist. She believes that people canand will save the planets biodiversity not

just because there is something in it for them,butbecause, eventually, they will care. Emma Marris writes for Nature from

Columbia, Missouri.

See Editorial, page 251, Opinion, page 277, and the

biodiversity special at www.nature.com/darwin.

Gretchen Daily hopes that

ecosystem services can buy

time for biodiversity.

V.

EVANS

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