Jon Sutinen

Jon Sutinen tells us that how society will prepare for and respond to climate change will depend on the system that governs how we interact with marine ecosystems. This governance system has not performed well to date. In fact, those governing systems are all changing right now.

What are the trends of marine ecosystems? Marine environmental degradation has not only continued, but intensified DESPITE international action to regulate and help. How come? Jon asks: why do we find ourselves with degraded ecosystems? How do we mitigate the degradation and improve the status of these ecosystems? What are the governance challenges unique to climate change? What is needed to adapt to changes?

Governance is a framework for explaining outcomes. There are 3 basic mechanisms that drive human behavior: markets (economic drivers), government (legal and political drivers), and civil society (social drivers -- norms, trends, preferences). Each driver has features and major weaknesses, discussed below.

Markets are the principal drivers of extraction of resources, disposal of pollutants, and habitat alteration. Market prices don't tell the ecological truth: they don't reflect the full consequences of use of resources (e.g. spills and discharges, wastewater discharge, nutrient runoff). That's not necessarily because participants are "bad" or amoral people -- just rational actors maximizing their returns.

Governments: often have jurisdictions that don't map well to the ecosystem boundaries. They are fragmented and disjointed (e.g. a separation between Dept of Transportation and Dept. of Fisheries), sometimes even counter-productive. There is a lack of "political will" and the difficulty of politicians balancing short-term results against long-term consequences. There are multiple regulatory bodies working in same arena.

Social Drivers/ Civil Society. Social norms and networks influence public policy and societal behavior patterns. Incompatible social norms and conflicts among interest groups (e.g. jetski recreational enthusiasts vs. conservationists?) impede ecosystem protection efforts. Civil organizations -- Atlantic Coastal Action Program, World Wildlife Foundation, Conservation Law Foundation, The Ocean Conservancy.

What can economists do to influence these drivers? We can correct and mitigate market failures -- design or reform markets to tell the ecological truth. Calculate ecological costs of pollution, habitat destruction, overexploitation. Incorporate (as tariffs/taxes/subsidies) into market prices. Cap and trade rights to do particular activities.

We can correct and mitigate government weaknesses: harmonize policies and regulations. Combat shortsighted effects, and avoid decoupled costs and benefits (this isn't happening in the USA). And we can build and strengthen social capital. In the USA (and particularly in Maine) nonprofits and interest groups are very strong actors. That's not true in every country or region. We can help facilitate cooperation, and we can help delegate some monitoring and other functions to non-government actors.

Jon asks: How will climate change differ from the challenges like pollution, over harvesting to marine ecosystem (e.g. where there is an identifiable "bad guy" doing a particular action that hurts the environment)? The external forcing of changes will trigger disruptions in all three of the drivers of behavior. Given their inherent weaknesses, will markets, government, and civil society react well? He doesn't know the answer (but he sounds pessimistic).

See A Handbook on Governance and Socioeconomics of Large Marine Ecosystems for more discussion.



Jon's presentation slides are also available online.

Q: do you have any success stories?
A: We're looking! But we see shifts from one driver to the other -- e.g. civil society discovered that polluted rivers were causing typhoid: their actions created behavior by government that regulated pollution in rivers. We have a crisis-driven reaction time: things have to get really bad for all three of the social actors to take action.

Q: Andy Pershing asks: ecologists think that climate change and variability will favor the generalist species and hurt the specialists. Do you think that's true for society, too?
A: Yes. In the market sector, firms that are agile will do way better as the market changes; firms that are very specialized have a lot more risk.

Q: Lew Incze: the "protect and conserve" mentality in the public assumes that if you can "put a fence" around a resource, it won't change. As a scientist, I understand that a better definition is to protect and conserve the capacity of the ecosystem to respond to change, or to adapt to change. You can't be sure it will stay the same -- it's going to change. What you need to preserve is the ability to respond. It's related to what Dan said about putting fishermen into boxes that restricts their ability to diversify across fisheries.
A: you definitely see this. We need to use proper regulatory methods to control or help resources, and so terminology or approach matter a lot.

Q: I work for a fisheries manager. We've never in 7 years had any non-economic measures available to us in order to talk about non-market values of conserving fish habitat; we have to frame everything in terms of preventing bad economic impacts of losing the habitat. We're also missing cumulative effect assessment (adding a dock here, re-sanding a beach there) of many small projects on fish habitat. We want more data and information.
A: (includes Jon's answer and questioner's follow up comments) I worked for a long time for organizations collecting this kind of information, and would have been happy to share social and economic information -- but often that information doesn't seem to be used, seriously, by policymakers in making decisions. I'm not sure scientists and social scientists and policymakers are all that good at talking to one another. And we work on very different time scales -- policymakers and nonprofits need to write a report today; scientists want to study something and get back to you in two years.
A: Robert: we social scientists need to get better about communicating our work to people who can use it. And although we do operate on different timescales and with different thresholds of certainty, we can provide policymakers with "ballpark" estimates that might be useful. We're also looking into how transferable non-market values are from one region to another, so that when studies are done we are adding to a knowledge base that can be used by people in similar, but not identical situations.
A: Dan Holland -- we need to learn, too, about the accuracy and usefulness of our models, and how we can share or transfer what we learn from modeling.


Q: Timescale question -- how long after we collect data does it get implemented into federal policy? Scientific data has a time lag, and sometimes that's dangerous, because the resulting policy is based on old science. How about in economic data?
A: It depends. Sometimes you can turn around a study very quickly. It depends on the specificity of the result you need. It also depends on the extent to which similar research has already been done. But as you're doing your ecological study and start your economic study at the same time, and it won't take longer than the environmental study. Where the delay comes in is that the economics is thrown in as an afterthought: the ecological conclusions come out and they say, hey, you've got a month, will you do an economic study?
A: Priscilla Brooks: economics comes in at the end, in an Environmental Impact Statement analysis, when the alternatives have already been identified. Can't we bring the economics in earlier, so it can be involved in selecting and identifying what the options and conclusions should be?
A: Jon: yes, and I blame us, the economists. We haven't done a good job explaining the value of what we do.