BIODIVERSITY & THE MUKULA TREE

Chinese Demand for Bloodwood Cuts Into Congo’s Ecosystem. Corruption and lack of oversight allow illegally logged timber to be traded from Africa’s heartland to the coast of China.

The Mukula tree, know as bloodwood is disapearring due to overharversting in east and south africa.

There are no official statistics for how many Mukula trees have been felled, but demand for the wood is so high that Zambia has banned exports of the wood. In China, a tonne of Mukula sells for between 17,000 and 22,000 renminbi per tonne ($2,500 and $3,200 a tonne). Greenpeace estimates that as much as 15,000 tonnes of the wood are sold each month from just four of the biggest Mukula markets in Zhang Jiagang in eastern China, home to the country’s largest Mukula processing industry. China’s rosewood furniture market was worth at least 100 billion renminbi ($15 billion) in 2012.

Local authorities are making some efforts to curb the trade. The DRC arrested 14 Chinese nationals in May on suspicion of illegal logging and export of Mukula wood. Still, any serious effort to moderate Mukula logging will have to come from China.

“As the most influential timber market in the world, China can and should support African countries’ efforts to tackle illegal logging and timber trade,” said Wenjing Pan, Greenpeace’s senior global campaigner.

Biodiversity

At face value, the importance of biological diversity to sustainable development is obvious. Beyond the intrinsic value we ascribe to living organisms and assemblages, biodiversity contributes to numerous ecosystem processes that support ecological, economic and social well-being. Biodiversity enhances the ability of ecosystems – including heavily modifi ed ecosystems such as those found in farms, gardens, cities and towns – to cope with climatic and environmental shocks. Biodiversity supports food security by providing raw genetic material for improved crop and livestock varieties. Biodiversity provides opportunities for indigenous and other communities to cultivate market niches based on traditional knowledge and livelihood practices. Indeed, biodiversity and the ecosystem processes in which it is implicated provide a host of services to people that would otherwise require expensive technological and financial inputs. These include the purification of water and air; the provision of food, fibre, timber and fuel; the mitigation of floods, drought, disease; and soon. In more ways than we yet understand, biodiversity is central to the sustainability of human societies and economies.

LES^SENCE Building a biodiversity-based sector

A biodiversity-based sector of the economy is defined here as consisting of businesses and other economic activities that either depend on biodiversity for their core business or that contribute to biodiversity conservation through their activities. This particular solution focuses on how communities and entrepreneurs can support biodiversity conservation, alleviate poverty and reduce pressures to deforest while contributing to sustainable development of the local economy.

Many biodiversity-based enterprises are run by communities, which are able to access raw materials
or products from community-managed lands. Typical products include ecosystem goods such as non-timber forest products (NTFP) and agro-forestry products. In Lumumbashi this includes forest honey, mukula, aloe vera products, ‘banuaka beads’, medicinal plants, fisheries (ornamental fish and
fish for consumption), cocoa and adan rice. Three of these community-managed products—makula inoculation and cultivation, certification of cocoa agro-forest producers and
the Tagal system & cage aquaculture for fish—are described in the tables that follow, along with one service— community-based ecotourism. In the case of the latter, particular emphasis is placed on the potential for trans- boundary ecotourism, an integrated strategy for which would enhance biodiversity and local livelihoods while helping to sustain local Dayak culture.

Also presented in the tables below is a related category of enterprises referred to here as ‘future biodiversity-based businesses’. Those presented here are: ecosystem restoration services, protecting and restoring abandoned logging concessions, bio-banking and bioprospecting. While some of these businesses have already begun to emerge in the HoB, in order for them truly to flourish, existing barriers, such as lack of entrepreneurial capacity, perverse incentives currently in place for unsustainable businesses, lack of recognition of tenure rights of indigenous peoples, conflicting regulations, etc. need to be overcome.

Abstract

Recent experiments have provided some evidence that loss of biodiversity may impair the functioning and sustainability of ecosystems. However, we still lack adequate theories and models to provide robust generalizations, predictions, and interpretations for such results. Here I present a mechanistic model of a spatially structured ecosystem in which plants compete for a limiting soil nutrient. This model shows that plant species richness does not necessarily enhance ecosystem processes, but it identifies two types of factors that could generate such an effect: complementarity among species in the space they occupy below ground and positive correlation between mean resource-use intensity and diversity. In both cases, the model predicts that plant biomass, primary productivity, and nutrient retention all increase with diversity, similar to results reported in recent field experiments. These two factors, however, have different implications for the understanding of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. The model also shows that the effect of species richness on productivity or other ecosystem processes is masked by the effects of physical environmental parameters on these processes. Therefore, comparisons among sites cannot reveal it, unless abiotic conditions are very tightly controlled. Identifying and separating out the mechanisms behind ecosystem responses to biodiversity should become the focus of future experiments.

                                      

                                  

Primary productivity as a function of species richness, in the two cases of “redundant” species (total occupied space constant, A) and “complementary” species (average occupied space constant, B). Scenario 1 (continuous line), average resource-use intensity independent of species richness; scenario 2 (circles), species added in increasing order of resource-use intensity; scenario 3 (squares), species added in decreasing order of resource-use intensity. Resource-use intensities are assumed to follow a regular distribution, L*i = iL*1. All other parameters are identical for all species. Parameter values: R0 = 220, L*1 = VR = kμ = 1, δ = 0.5, Sσ = 20 in A, and σ = 1 in B.

                                      

Primary productivity as a function of species richness, in the two cases of “redundant” species (total occupied space constant, A) and “complementary” species (average occupied space constant, B). Scenario 1 (continuous line), average resource-use intensity independent of species richness; scenario 2 (circles), species added in increasing order of resource-use intensity; scenario 3 (squares), species added in decreasing order of resource-use intensity. Resource-use intensities are assumed to follow a regular distribution, L*i = iL*1. All other parameters are identical for all species. Parameter values: R0 = 220, L*1 = VR = kμ = 1, δ = 0.5, Sσ = 20 in A, and σ = 1 in B.

Robustness and the Spatial Correlation of Risk: Extensions of the Loreau Model

The results reported by Loreau et al. (2003), summarized above, provide a simple illustration of the spatial insurance hypothesis. They demonstrated how dispersal, as a mechanism to increase biodiversity, insures the system against asynchronous environmental fluctuations. In what follows we extend the model to consider factors that affect the spatial correlation of environmental risk, and the capacity of dispersal to stabilize productivity both at the level of individual communities and across the metacommunity.

Natural resources are rarely constant over time or space. To capture this variation we allow the natural resource influx, I, to vary stochastically over time, affecting the quantity of resources available for species consumption. This we define as “environmental risk.”7 (Note that “environmental risk” affects the equation of motion for the resource and not variation in species consumption rates.) Several modeling options are available. 

Formally, the “risk” of an outcome is the value of the outcome multiplied by the probability that it will occur. We take the value of outcomes to be the associated level of productivity, and tested the effect of different correlation coefficients of the probability distribution of the underlying environmental variables on productivity. Specifically, we consider two extreme cases of the spatial correlation of risks—local and global risk. Global risk implies that resource availability in each community is determined by the same set of environmental conditions, i.e. risks are perfectly correlated spatially. Local risk implies that communities are either far enough apart or sufficiently different in other respects that resource availability depends only on local environmental conditions, i.e. risks are uncorrelated spatially. We then tested intermediate levels of the spatial correlation of environmental risk by allowing rates of resource influx in individual patches to be more or less spatially correlated. Influx values for the patches were drawn from a multivariate normal distribution with the same mean and standard deviation as the global and local risk scenarios, but with varying values for the correlation coefficients. Parameters used to generate resource influx rates are presented in in Table 2.

Table 2

Parameter values of model extensions.

Variable	Value	Interpretation	Units
μI	165	Average resource influx rate	resource biomass
σI	variable 1,5,10,25	Standard deviation of resource influx	-
ρI	variable 0.01,0.1,0.2,0.4,0.7	Correlation coefficient of resource influx	-
μa	variable [0,1]	Average dispersal rate	time-1
COVa	variable 0.1,0.2,0.4,0.7,1	Coefficient of variation of dispersal rate	resource biomass-1

Note that a value of “-” indicates a dimensionless parameter. In our first extension, resource influx rates, I, are drawn from a normal distribution with a mean μI and covariance matrix composed of the standard deviation σI(diagonals) and spatial correlation coefficient ρI (off-diagonals). In our second extension, dispersal rates are drawn from a beta distribution where scale parameters are calculated using the average (μa) and coefficient of variation (COVa) of the dispersal rate.

Results

Our primary result is summarized in Figure 3. As in the original papers, we found that intermediate dispersal rates tend to stabilize productivity across the system. However, we also found that the stabilizing effect of dispersal depends strongly on the degree to which environmental risks are correlated across communities. Specifically, we found the stabilizing effect of dispersal to be weakest when resource availability is spatially perfectly correlated (ρI = 1) across communities (Figure 3). In these circumstances all communities experience the same costs (benefits) of low (high) resource availability, and any compensation occurs temporally and at the level of the whole system. Periods of poor resource availability are compensated by periods of resource abundance. When environmental risks are not spatially correlated—implying that resource availability varies across communities—we found dispersal within the metacommunity to be more strongly stabilizing. A fall in productivity in one community where resource availability is low is compensated by an increase in productivity in other communities where resource availability is high. At intermediate levels of the spatial correlation of environmental risk, we found intermediate stabilizing effects of dispersal

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Figure 3

Effect of spatial correlation (ρI) of stochastic resource availability on the mean coefficient of variation of productivity. Reported values are the average of 50 simulations. Colors indicate the degree of spatial correlation: black, solid (global risk; perfect spatial correlation, ρI = 1), brown (ρI = 0.7), purple (ρI = 0.4), blue (ρI = 0.2), red (ρI = 0.1), orange (ρI = 0.01), and black, dashed (local risk; no spatial correlation, ρI = 0). The standard deviation of the resource availability (σI) is given above each plot.

We found that dispersal promotes stability of productivity under local and global environmental resource stochasticity, but that its effectiveness differs substantially depending on the degree of the spatial correlation of risk. We found that the insurance effect on productivity is greatest when environmental risks across communities are not correlated. In other words, the insurance function of dispersal is greatest where risks are local. Low productivity communities are compensated by high productivity ones. Where the environmental risks experienced by each community are highly spatially correlated, the insurance effects of dispersal still exist but are significantly weaker. This result is consistent with the asynchrony literature (Loreau and de Mazancourt, 2013). For instance, Loreau and de Mazancourt (2013) demonstrated analytically that asynchronies in species responses to environmental stochasticity stabilize community-level variation in species biomass.

Biodiversity-based products from community-managed areas .

LES^SENCE Community inoculation and cultivation solutions

Future biodiversity business

Ecosystem restoration services
What is the issue?	Degraded ecosystems cannot provide their many ecosystem services properly anymore, causing risks not only for those who live on the land concerned, but throughout the watershed. Many forests in the HoB are under threat of degradation.
Who is the seller?	Communities or companies, or a combination of the two, whereby a company sub-contracts implementation and monitoring to communities.
Who is the buyer?	Land owner, concession holder, government
Steps towards successful business model:	Acquire technical knowledge for ecosystem restoration; Build good relationships with local communities and involve them in planning process; Implement plan.
What can banks do: What can the private sector do?	Engage in public-private partnership with government to engage in biobanking (See biobanking below) for conservation and ecosystem restoration. Use and develop local community capacities in the industry; Support the tagal system by working closely with the local communities; Businesses can explore market and exploit the opportunity; Businesses can approach local communities who manage their forest sustainably to jointly develop a restoration plan and subcontract their services in its implementation; Communities can form a business that provides ecosystem restoration services professionally.
What can the Government do?	National: Create a budget line for PES or ecosystem restoration and allocate budget; Make restoration mandatory for certain economic activities; Incentivize companies to restore degraded land by releasing restoration-concession holders from land tax while restoration is in progress; Incentivize companies to apply for restoration concessions by granting them priority to participate in the REDD+ scheme, once the mechanism is in place. Local: Create a market by purchasing restoration services; Countries whose national development plans envision a knowledge-based economy, can use related allocations to fund advanced technical training and knowledge transfer for ecosystem restoration; Exempt concession holders from yearly permits (self approval of activities); Make restoration-concession eligible to obtain dedicated public funds.
Contribution to...	Securing natural capital: Restores the ecological functions of ecosystems and biodiversity; more intact natural stocks (forest, soil, water, biodiversity) increase the flow of ecosystem services; investing in timely ecosystem restoration prevents severe degradation in the future. Poverty reduction: Income can be earned, additionally or as a main profession, by community groups implementing and monitoring restoration plans; more intact natural stocks increase flow of potential revenue streams from ecosystem goods (forest products, fish, tourism) for local communities. Economic growth: By creating a market for these services, income can be gained from them, adding to economic activity. Climate change mitigation / adaptation: Restoring forest ecosystems will create a buffer against the impacts of climate change, as carbon sink function increases.

Bioprospecting
What is the issue?	Due to its diversity, the HoB provides good bioprospecting opportunities. Genetic resources and agro-biodiversity in large parts of the HoB have been used, cultivated, managed and modified by local people for centuries. This rich tradition (codified in language, plant names, local pharmacopeia and recipes, etc) has made it possible to identify and recognize potential uses of plants and other organisms for food, medicinal and other purposes. The holders and custodians of this traditional knowledge should be enabled to share in the financial gains made from these genetic recourses. Rather than seeing bioprospecting solely as an opportunity for financial gain, the source country may want to negotiate a form of cooperation which builds institutional and human resource capacity for research and development.
Who is the seller?	Currently governments of countries engage in bioprospecting agreements as ‘sellers’
Who is the buyer?	Pharmaceutical companies engage in bioprospecting agreements as ‘buyers’
Steps towards successful business model: What can investors do	Establish database of species found in the HoB and related traditional knowledge; Establish procedure to secure intellectual property (IP) rights; Establish a mechanism for benefit sharing with local communities; Raise community awareness concerning their IP rights; Provide a one-stop shop for prospective bioprospecting customers. Generate and sell credits representing the rights to the conservation or enhancement of environmental attributes Exploit investment opportunities
What can the private sector do?	• Start joint ventures with local communities, to enable local retention of financial gains and knowledge and capacity building.
What can the Government do?	National: Develop action plan for implementing Nagoya protocol for equitable benefit sharing under CBD; Resolve issues regarding the rights of indigenous communities in the HoB, including Intellectual Property rights; Devolve authority to enter into bioprospecting agreements to province/district governments, to facilitate local benefit sharing; Countries whose national development plans envision a knowledge-based economy can use related budgetary allocations to fund advanced technical training and knowledge transfer in biochemical sciences. Local: • Establish biodiversity center as knowledge hub, one-stopshop for bioprospecting “customers”, provide related space, equipment and laboratory services for sample analysis.
Contribution to...	Securing natural capital: By attaching value to biodiversity in this way, natural capital will gain appreciation in general. However, the challenge lies in ensuring the ability to share the benefits of biodiversity with the local communities who are the custodians of the resources. Poverty reduction: Poverty reduction can be attained through bioprospecting provided benefits are shared with the local communities. Economic growth: Both the pharmaceutical industry and the conservation-related industries are boosted through bioprospecting; if benefits are shared equitably this will further boost the local economy. Climate change mitigation / adaptation: As bioprospecting requires biodiversity, it duly requires healthy ecosystems, which in the HoB inevitably entails health forest ecosystems. Thus, lucrative bioprospecting serves as an incentive to forest conservation and avoidance of deforestation and forest degradation and related carbon emissions.

Biobanking
What is the issue?	Significant finance is required to protect biodiversity and restore degraded ecosystems; a lack of financial incentive to conserve land makes it difficult to compete with other land uses that generate a financial return. Biobanking confers value to the land that allows it to compete with alternative land uses. The example of Malua BioBank has shown that there is a willingness to pay for biodiversity conservation services in the HoB (see box).
Who is the seller?	The owner of the land (private or government) or the company/government/ individual who has biodiversity rights over the area
Who is the buyer?	Private individuals /companies /organizations
Steps towards successful business model:	Identify and characterize target market, i.e. a geographic area or industry in which there are market constraints on conservation that could be diverted to dedicated management areas; Establish a long-term legal agreement to conserve the area and commercialize the rights to the environmental attributes; Raise capital to invest in conservation works; Estimate costs of land conservation and calculate/position the price of the product; Establish conservation management plan and conduct protection or enhancement activities; Quantify environmental attributes and, if applicable, submit for third-party approval certification; Market environmental credits according to sales strategy; Establish a perpetual charitable trust from funds generated from sales to fund ongoing management of the area or to endow long-term conservation management organization.
What can banks do:	• Generate and sell credits representing the rights to the conservation or enhancement of environmental attributes
What can the private sector do?	Buy credits to improve environmental footprint of direct operations and across supply chains; Buy credits to offset quantified reliably and independently verified environmental impacts; Invest in biobanks.
What can the Government do?	Businesses can explore market and exploit the opportunity; Businesses can approach local communities who manage their forest sustainably to jointly develop a restoration plan and subcontract their services in its implementation; Communities can form a business that provides ecosystem restoration services professionally. National: Integrate biobanking into national conservation strategy. Establish a market-based system for biodiversity offsets based on a legal requirement to compensate for environmental impacts from development. Local: Enable non-traditional organizations, such as financial institutions, to hold and manage ‘conservation concessions’
Contribution to...	Securing natural capital: Highly replicable and scalable model designed to raise capital to protect and restore the most valuable and threatened natural capital over the long term. Poverty reduction: Biobanks are a potential source of financing for community forest management whereby biobank managers enter into a joint venture with impoverished and/ or disadvantaged landowners ensuring that revenues are shared and/or landowners are paid to protect and manage their land for its environmental attributes. The funding channeled towards conservation provides income and livelihoods for members of the community doing restoration work, patrolling, management, etc. Economic growth: Biobanks work by assigning a commercial value to the restoration or protection of environmental attributes and attracting private capital to fund these outcomes. A new biobanking industry would add to GDP while ensuring that conservation of environmental attributes becomes fully integrated into sustainable development. Climate change mitigation / adaptation: Carbon stocks are just one of a range of environmental attributes that biobanks could protect and enhance, thereby contributing directly to climate change mitigation. Bio banks focusing on biodiversity protection will also assist with climate change adaptation.