Governments are beginning to promote and incentivize natural climate solutions as one of the important ways to address the climate crisis. The latest session of the Nature-Based Solutions: Current Issues webinar series will spotlight two such government programs in the United States—the Massachusetts Forests as Climate Solutions Initiative and the Regional Climate Protection Authority in Sonoma County, California.

The National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) invites those interested in ecosystem services and nature-based solutions to a webinar on August 23. Attendees will hear from speakers involved in newly released White House draft guidance from the Executive Office of the President on accounting for ecosystems services in benefit-cost analysis.

In November, the Biden-Harris administration released a roadmap for unlocking the potential of nature-based solutions in the United States. In the fourth session of the Nature-Based Solutions: Current Issues webinar series, hear from two authors of the roadmap, as well as federal agency representatives.

US federal agencies use cost-benefit analysis (CBA) to make decisions about the types of infrastructure projects to implement. In the third session of the Nature-Based Solutions: Current Issues webinar series, experts working with the federal government discuss how these policies might be updated to enable more nature-based solutions projects.

One of the major hurdles keeping NbS projects from scaling up is finding ways to pay for them. This session, the second of the Nature-based Solutions: Current Issues webinar series, highlights insights about various mechanisms that can be used to pay for NbS, including state and federal policies and programs, as well as finance tools.

Session one of the Nature-based Solutions: Current Issues webinar series focuses on assessing the costs and benefits of NbS. How can we account for all the benefits NbS provide? How do they compare to more traditional (gray infrastructure) solutions? What is the return on investment for NbS?

In this National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) webinar, hear about three examples of policy applications for Natural Capital Accounts (NCA) from Carter Ingram (The Pollination Group), Eli Fenichel (Office of Science and Technology Policy), and Kirsten Oleson (University of Hawai'i).

Natural capital accounting provides a way to integrate the value of ecosystem services into national economic reporting systems and is increasingly being adopted around the world.

In this National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) webinar, Justin Johnson (University of Minnesota) will present recent work completed with the World Bank that lays out a new model, GTAP-InVEST, that links a computable general equilibrium model from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) with an ecosystem services model, Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to assess important sustainability challenges.

In this National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) webinar, hear from Gregory Frey at the U.S. Forest Service, who will present on an effort to account, estimate, and document the full extent of direct payments for ecosystem services to private forest landowners in the United States. This includes payments derived from markets, subsidies, and hybrid approaches, from both governmental and non-governmental sources.

In this National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) webinar, hear from Bonnie Keeler (University of Minnesota) for a presentation that will synthesize the results of over a decade of ecosystem services valuation work in the U.S. state of Minnesota.

By linking nature and people, ecosystem services can be a valuable tool for understanding racial and social justice around natural resource management and environmental degradation. There is no easy recipe for integrating equity in ecosystem services work, but hearing about different ways that people have addressed the interplay between equity and ecosystem services can help us all to think more critically about inequities in our work related to who benefits from ecosystem services, how decisions are made about managing ecosystem services, and what services are prioritized.

By linking nature and people, ecosystem services can be a valuable tool for understanding racial and social justice around natural resource management and environmental degradation. There is no easy recipe for integrating equity in ecosystem services work, but hearing about different ways that people have addressed the interplay between equity and ecosystem services can help us all to think more critically about inequities in our work related to who benefits from ecosystem services, how decisions are made about managing ecosystem services, and what services are prioritized.

The National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) was formed over a decade ago to create a national network for sharing ecosystem services information, to establish pathways for implementation of ecosystem services concepts, and to help integrate ecosystem services information into decision-making.

Hear from Ken Bagstad (USGS), Katie Warnell (Duke University), Charles Rhodes (TBD Economics), and Marc Russell (US EPA) about "Testing ecosystem accounting in the United States: A case study for the Southeast" [DOI link] that details the first effort to develop Ecosystem Accounts for the U.S. at a broad scale. The team will describe the potential for U.S.

In the next National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) webinar, hear from Emily Pindilli, an economist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), about the USGS LandCarbon program’s in-depth ecosystem service assessments at three different National Wildlife Refuges.

In the next National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP) webinar on Thursday, August 1, at 2 p.m. ET, report co-authors Alex Pfaff from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, and Stephen Polasky from the Department of Applied Economics at University of Minnesota, will present an interpretation of the report contents and its implications.

Dr. Lydia Olander and Sara Mason of Duke University will share their approach to using Ecosystem Services Conceptual Models as a framework to think about ecosystem services and how they can be considered within the National Estuarine Research Reserve System.