Global Strategies for Restoring Natural Capital: A Symposium PIs: Peter Raven (Missouri Botanical Garden), James Aronson (CEFE/CNRS, Montpellier, France), James Blignaut (University of Pretoria, South Africa)
Over the past three decades, ecological restoration has emerged as a widely popular, transcultural initiative that fosters the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded, damaged, or destroyed. Ecological restoration thus represents a practical way to replenish or augment current stocks of natural capital and flows of ecosystem goods and services, while also providing direct benefit for human wellbeing in the form of job creation and various immaterial benefits (e.g., social, cultural, and spiritual). Until now, many economists have taken cognizance of ecological engineering but not of ecological restoration, whose goal is to recover autogenic (self-sustaining) systems requiring few management and maintenance inputs. Moreover, despite their obvious complementarities, there has been little interaction-let alone cross-fertilization-between economics and restoration ecology to date. This grant will support an international Symposium that will bring together a large portion of the people who have considered these issues, from a range of different intellectual and cultural perspectives. The goal is to develop a clear rationale a) for doing restoration ecology on the conceptual basis of natural capital, and b) for actual investments of financial and human capital in the hands-on replenishment of natural capital, in ever-closer concert with rational ecosystem management and nature conservation. The symposium will 1) identify gaps in knowledge, 2) find new ways of approaching controversial issues, and 3) define priorities for future research: i.e., seek insight rather than consensus. The envisaged outcome is to catalyze a quantum leap in our understanding of the emerging "post-normal" fields of ecological economics and sustainability science that will be collated into a book-a sequel to an earlier book based on a workshop held in 2004 in South Africa to discuss the economics of ecological restoration in developing countries of the South. A Symposium website will be partially open to the public prior to the Symposium and entirely open thereafter. At least one third of Symposium participants will be women, and six graduate students, four from the U.S. and two from Australia, will participate. The Symposium will promote networking and development of collaborative strategies and policies in countries of the North, the South, and internationally.
