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Ecosystem Services

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Climate One

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Partner:: Climate One
Location:: The Commonwealth Club
San Francisco, CA
Event Date:: 09.12.11
Speakers:: Greg Dalton,; Jib Ellison,; Peter Seligmann
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Summary: "Humanity needs nature to thrive." For Peter Seligmann, who delivered that line, and Jib Ellison, who shared the stage with him at Climate One on Monday, September 12, the abundant services provided by nature too often go unrecognized. So what are those services, asked Climate One's Greg Dalton. In basic terms, replied Seligmann, co-founder and CEO, Conservation International, ecosystem services are what we get from the natural world. He assigned those services to one of four categories: provisions – food, freshwater, and medicine; regulating – climate, flood control on coasts; supporting – the soil and nutrient cycles; and cultural – the places we live, the places that shape our belief systems. All of them are essential for people, he said, but "we've lost track of the relationship that we have with nature and ecosystem services because we don't think about our foods coming from a forest or a farm; it comes from the supermarket. There's a real disconnect now." Jib Ellison, CEO, Blu Skye, a sustainability consultancy that advises Fortune 50 companies, emphasized that business is just as indebted to the natural world. "If you think about all the goods and services that you can buy in a store, all of it ultimately is coming from somewhere down the line out of nature." "The big companies in the world with visionary leaders are realizing," he said, "that as they look out five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years, and they see the rise of population growth, the continued economic activity in this current paradigm of doing things, the security of supply to serve their customers is at risk." Ellison, borrowing an analogy favored by his friend Seligmann, compared nature's fragility to that of an airplane. You can take out one, two, five rivets and the plane will still fly. But take out the last crucial rivet, the wing falls off, and the plane crashes. It's the same with nature, he said. We're taking out too many rivets for ecosystems to survive. The grave threat to natural systems around the globe has convinced both men of the need for environmentalists to preach beyond the converted, and to engage with business, including giants such as Wal-Mart. "What I've always felt," Seligmann said, "is that if the environmental community focuses on the fifteen percent of the world that are true, ardent environmentalists we're losing, losing, losing. We've got to make the tent big enough for everybody. Over time, that creates trust."

He went on: "We need to figure out which institutions have to change if we're going to succeed. We're involved in making development smart and sustainable. And that means we have to change the way development works. And, for that, you need to change business."

An absolutely critical element to get us there, said Ellison, is transparency on costs. "For businesses, as soon as we can start to quantify, and put a dollar amount – a true cost that is recognized by organizations like Conservation International and universities, which is all underway – that will make it a lot easier for CFOs to actually do the calculations that need to be done to do the right thing."

"The sustainable economy is only going to come under one condition: When the lowest-priced good –the lowest-priced T-shirt at Wal-Mart – is lowest priced precisely because it does the least harm," he said.

Bio

Greg Dalton

Gregory Dalton is chief operating officer at the Commonwealth Club of California and Director of The Club's Climate 1 Initiative. He previously was international editor at The Industry Standard magazine, an editor for the Associated Press in New York, and a correspondent in China and Canada for the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper.

Proficient in both Mandarin and Cantonese, he is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jib Ellison

Jib Ellison assists senior leadership in creating new, innovative, and wealth-creating strategies. Through an unprecedented angle of attack, he helps clients create visions that have the power to transform markets. He helps CEOs understand sustainability as a business proposition, align behind a plan, and commit to the actions necessary to capture business value. He brings a select network of content experts and organizations to deliver the best solutions to his clients. His work includes designing and overseeing organization-wide transformation processes for Fortune 50 companies, building high-performance leadership teams, improving cross-functional teamwork, strengthening corporate culture to deliver results, and one-on-one coaching for CEOs. Recent clients include Wal-Mart, Kleiner Perkins, Environmental Defense, Conservation International, Vodafone, McKesson, Gap Inc., The Home Depot, Nokia, YMCA, and Barclays Global Investors. A class V river guide, he has led whitewater expeditions on five continents.

Peter Seligmann

Peter A. Seligmann is one of today's most dynamic leaders in the global conservation movement, where he has brought innovation and action to the forefront of biodiversity protection for more than 25 years. In 1987, he co-founded Conservation International, and as Chairman and CEO he has positioned CI at the cutting edge of conservation, creating lasting solutions to biodiversity and sustainable development challenges.

Seligmann holds a masters degree from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Science and an honorary Doctorate in Science from Michigan State University. In 2001, he was awarded the Order of the Golden Ark from the Netherlands. Seligmann serves on the board of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Oregon, and the Mayor's Environmental Council in Washington, D.C. He also serves on several corporate boards, as well as on the advisory councils of the Jackson Hole Land Trust, Ecotrust and other not-for-profit organizations, including the Japanese Keidanren's Nature Conservation Fund. In 2000, President Clinton named him a member of the Enterprise for the Americas Board.

Seligmann's work has been featured by ABC's "Nightline," CNN and Fortune Magazine. A strong advocate of building partnerships, Seligmann has forged groundbreaking joint projects between the environmental community and other sectors, including government and industry. In 1998, CI established the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science, and in 2001, the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. In 2000, CI launched the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund in collaboration with the World Bank and the MacArthur Foundation.