Biodiversity in its fullest expression provides society with many benefits, direct and indirect. While some of these can be represented in dollars and cents, others cannot—at least not yet. Nonetheless, there is an increasing realization that biodiversity benefits not only our material well-being and livelihoods, but also contributes to security, health, and freedom of choices and actions. It is no coincidence that many of the regions around the world experiencing the greatest political and social unrest—and requiring the attention or intervention of U.S. military forces—are those where biodiversity and natural resources have been most severely depleted.
The value of biodiversity can be expressed from a variety of perspectives, ranging from scientific and economic to ethical and aesthetic. The Endangered Species Act includes a formal expression of this respect and value for biodiversity, noting that “…species of fish, wildlife, and plants are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its People.” And while the focus of the Act is on preventing the loss of species, the emphasis on ecosystems contained in the Act’s purpose statement makes clear the connection to the broader concept of biodiversity: “…to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved…” Other legal expressions of the value of biodiversity include the Clean Water Act’s protections for wetland habitats, which are important not only for fish and wildlife, but benefit people through their role in regulating and purification of water supplies and reducing flood risks to communities and infrastructure.
Over the past two decades there has been an increasing recognition of the value of biodiversity to people through the provision of “ecosystem services” (MEA 2005, IPBES 2019). Indeed, assessing, quantifying, and valuing ecosystem services has been a major focus of research in recent years, including the benefits such services provide to DoD facilities and infrastructure (McDowell et al. 2020). Of particular importance is the protective benefit of “natural infrastructure,” through reducing risks from natural hazards such as floods, wildfires, and landslides (Glick et al. 2020).
Drought and water security are critical concerns for many military installations, especially in the arid Southwest, and the role of biodiversity in regulating and sustaining water supplies is therefore of keen interest to DoD. Another ecosystem service of growing interest is the role of natural systems in climate protection, particularly the role that forests, grasslands, and other systems play in absorbing and storing carbon. The carbon sequestration potential of DoD’s twenty-five million acres of land can be expected to be a component of any overall national approach to climate mitigation. Finally, there has been considerable work by the Army Corps of Engineers in recent years on engineering guidelines for the use of natural and nature-based features to reduce risks to built infrastructure (Bridges et al. 2015), as well as to more accurately estimate the value of natural infrastructure in required benefit-cost estimates.
Go to next page: Balancing Mission and Biodiversity at Fort Bragg
Author
Bruce Stein, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Associate Vice President
National Wildlife Federation