[MUSIC] So here, Brad, to start this interview, I would like to suggest that you present yourself and the laboratory that you are leading at the University of Michigan. >> Sure, my name is Brad Cardinale. I'm a professor at the University of Michigan, and I'm mostly a freshwater ecologist. So all of my research focuses on how biodiversity in freshwater, mostly working with algae and vertebrates, and occasionally fish, can provide humanity with goods and services like clean water, pest control, and lately I've even been diverging into the area of biofuels. >> In 2012, you co-wrote an article, quite important, Biodiversity and its impact on humanity, that was published in Nature. Could you please explain to us, broadly speaking, how the loss of biodiversity is altering the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide humanity with goods and services? >> Sure, so this was a synthesis paper that brought together a whole bunch of authors who have been working in the field of biodiversity ecosystem services, to see if we could agree on what the data all show at the same time. And the take-home message is that as we lose diversity from nature, nature becomes less efficient and it becomes less productive. So imagine we look out here, we're losing species, and the hillsides are becoming 20 to 50% less green. Because they're not taking up as much sunlight, as much nutrients, as much water. They're becoming inefficient, they become leaky, and they become less productive. And that's important, because most of the things you care about, such as the production of clean water, purification of air, the ability to control pests or disease, or even produce food in the oceans or in crops, that all depends on how productive, efficient an ecosystem is. So if we lose diversity and it becomes less productive, we lose things we care about as a result. >> Okay, and reversely, in fact, in the same paper, you illustrated that the correlation between biodiversity itself and the services that they provide is often quite weak. So is there not a danger that by trying now to promote and protect ecosystem services, we are somehow losing our impact on conservation of biodiversity? >> Yeah, that's a good point. So in that paper, we evaluated how biodiversity affects 32 different kinds of goods or services that ecosystems provide to humanity. And we had two messages from that paper. One is that for 14 of those services, there's really good evidence that biodiversity impacts them in the way that we thought. That biodiversity is critically important for providing us with things like food, fisheries in the oceans, for control of invasive species. But the second message of that paper is that the other ecosystem services, somewhere between 50 and 60%, we don't have the data required to say that biodiversity is important to them. And so the worry is that people have been making claims about how biodiversity is so important for this, that, or the other, but we don't have the data to back it up. And so the risk that I see is that we don't want to build a house of cards that falls down later on because it's not based on actual, real scientific data. >> So yes, we are entering, in fact, the field of the gaps that we have in our science to assess the ecosystem services. We are not, at this meeting, really exploring these gaps for the IPBES. What, in your opinion, are the main gaps to be filled? >> I think there's far more talk about ecosystem services than there are data available right now. I think everybody can identify what the ecosystem services are that we believe are important. I think it's fairly rare that we have good quantification that tell us how biology affects that service, so those are called ecological production functions. There's very few of those that exist, where we've actually linked biology to the service. And then we have even less that have taken that service and taken it all the way to human value, whether it's a dollar value, or whether it's something having to do with human health. And so in my mind, the biggest gap is that we just need to do the studies that get the data from the production function to the human well-being function. >> Right, and in this world of ecosystem services that has been evolving relatively quickly, especially in the policy arena. >> Yes. >> Do you have good examples where it was applied successfully that you could share with us? >> Yeah, I can share one that's ongoing. I don't think policy has been imposed yet, but it's an example where we're influencing policy. So in the US not long ago, this was last summer, there was a big bloom of an algal species called Microcystis. It's a cyanobacteria that creates a toxin, a neurotoxin that can hurt people, hurt animals. And the city of Toledo (Ohio, USA) had to shut down their entire water supply as a result of this for three days. We've been able to show through a method called hedonic pricing that housing prices and the tax base in Toledo dropped substantially as a result of this water crisis, and that's an ecosystem service. If we can keep that lake clean and keep that cyanobacteria from blooming, we can provide the city of Toledo with good quality water. And if we don't have that ecosystem service, housing prices plummet by, in this case, tens of millions of dollars, and the City of Toledo loses their tax base as a result. So the Governor of Toledo has been listening to our studies, and is beginning to take more seriously the need to improve water quality in Lake Erie as a result. >> Okay, and you also recently participated in a podcast organized by the Society of Freshwater Science, Ideas Making Waves. And you mentioned that you are freshwater expert. So I was wondering what you could say about the advance of assessing freshwater ecosystem services compared to other biomes. >> Unfortunately, I think my freshwater colleagues have been behind the curve in thinking about ecosystem services, and particularly thinking about how biodiversity effects ecosystem services. Much of this area of research has been driven by terrestrial ecologists. But freshwater ecologists are quickly catching up, and there are so many services in this world that rely on fresh water. It is going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks to humanity as we grow from 7 to potentially 9 billion people. The ability to provide them with quality and a quantity of fresh water we need to survive is going to be one of our biggest problems. So freshwater ecologists are recognizing that, and they're quickly catching up on this area of ecosystem services as a result. >> Okay. >> [MUSIC]
