Capabilities

Purpose

Ecosystem services are benefits that humans derive from nature. Among the most highly valued ecosystem benefits are clean water, protection from flooding and other extreme events, aesthetics, and nature-based recreation. These benefits are typically discounted or missed in environmental decision-making and in underlying policies because their value is less visible than the prices of market goods like raw materials, energy, or land for development.

We make ecosystem service values visible, leveling the playing field with market values, and enabling stakeholders to connect the health of the natural world around them to the well-being of people and regional economies.

Applications and Outcomes

We have completed ecosystem service assessments in a variety of locations and contexts. Our methods typically include mapping and quantifying ecosystem service flows in biophysical and/or monetary terms and estimating how those flows could change due to changes in land use, land management, or environmental quality.

Examples

Effects of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL

Natural Gas Pipelines in the Mid-Atlantic, and Natural Gas Extraction in Maryland

National Forests in North Carolina

Roanoke River Basin (Coming Soon)

Laurel Highlands (Coming Soon)

Delaware Estuary (Coming Soon) 

Resources

We created the EcoValuator, a QGIS plugin to help others estimate ES value for regions of their choice. 

The National Ecosystem Services Partnership offers an excellent guidebook for U.S. federal agencies and others who want to put these concepts to use in their planning, evaluation, and resource management decisions.

PURPOSE

Public policy and economic development should be designed and implemented to take full advantage of the positive relationships between human and natural communities. Key-Log Economics has deep experience in analyzing the ecological-economic implications of policy and development proposals and in supporting clients’ intervention in national and state/provincial level environmental reviews, including by delivering expert testimony and supporting clients’ strategic communications to secure environmental gains through administrative and legislative action. 

Applications and Outcomes

Our research and has supported and helped shape NGO's engagement in public decisions about energy development & transmission, protected area designations, water quality improvement, and sustainable rural development. We have also pioneered crowdsourcing and machine learning to ensure that citizen and expert input (public comment) on these proposals is fully counted and leveraged in decision-making.

Resources

Know how federal-level environmental review is supposed to happen in the U.S. and learn how you can do your part.  Read A Citizen's Guide to the NEPA.

PURPOSE

Neither ecosystems nor economies work in the one-way, straight-line, ways that many models suggest. Or, as in an aphorism penned by George Box (a statistician) "all models are wrong." Biophysical and behavioral reality involves balancing and reinforcing feedback loops (think snowball effects), lags, thresholds, and a host of other complications that are not always appropriate to assume away for the sake of keeping things simple.

But the second half of Box's statement is that "some models are useful." Systems thinking is, in our view, a pretty good way of improving the chances that one's model of reality—even when a simplified one—is "useful." And sometimes, of course, that thinking allows no other course of action than building a systems model where the model captures more of that real-world complexity and becomes less "wrong."

APPLICATIONS AND OUTCOMES

We have used systems thinking and formal systems modeling to expose flaws in conventional wisdom regarding how to sustain forest health and forest economies, to simulate the ecosystem services effects of fishery restoration, and, most recently, to explore relationships between river cleanup, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate vulnerability in Delhi, India. (An extremely simple, conceptual version of that model is pictured below.)

RESOURCES

There are several software options for systems modeling, but with our experts and collaborators spread across several locations, we like the cloud-based, real-time collaboration that is possible with Insight Maker. We also like that the platform is free to use and comes with great tutorials and an engaged user community. And if you want an old-school textbook to go with your cloud-based modeling, you can't go wrong with Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows (edited by Diana Wright. (2008.) Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, Vermont). You will never play with a Slinky the same way again!

Purpose

Cost-benefit analyses and cost-effectiveness analyses are not unique to economics, let alone to ecological-economics. People commonly try to achieve outcomes for which the benefits outweigh the costs, or, once an outcome is chosen, we want to get there in the least costly way possible. The challenge with decisions and outcomes affecting the environment is that it is too easy to miss or otherwise leave out the costs of lost non-market benefits, including ecosystem service value, and to discount the interests of future generations and other vulnerable populations affected by even seemingly rational policy choices.

Our work aims to ensure the most complete picture possible of the magnitude and, increasingly, the distribution of costs and benefits are available to stakeholders and communicated to decision makers. Although not sufficient for achieving environmental outcomes that are socially just, ecologically sustainable, and economically efficient, such information is absolutely necessary for making those outcomes possible. 

Applications and outcomes

Key-Log Economics’ experts have completed analyses of costs and/or benefits related to the flood control in the Delaware River Watershed, methane emissions from the solid waste and wastewater treatment sectors in Vietnam, nutrient and sediment pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, timber and other ecosystem service utilization in Indiana’s state forests, to name a few. 

Resources

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Guidelines for Preparing Economic Analyses (rev. 2014) is a veritable textbook for doing CBA and CEA. (Indeed our founder assigns it as such in his masters level courses.)

To the extent that ecosystem service values figure into the costs and/or benefits of conservation and development proposals, the EcoValuator, our QGIS plug-in for mapping ecosystem services of a custom region, should be in your toolbox.

PURPOSE

Organizations large and small sometimes need a fresh set of eyes, some additional analysis, or a new perspective in order to gain and use the best possible information to solve their programmatic and organizational challenges. Key-Log Economics’ team brings a combined eight decades of experience in staff, senior leadership, and board positions in governmental, for-profit, and NGO sectors to those challenges. 

APPLICATIONS AND OUTCOMES

While all of our research, modeling, and policy analysis brings that experience to bear at the individual project level, we also like to get to the 10,000 meter level and help clients discover and hone strategies for meeting their objectives in new ways or with new information and tools.

We also know that no organization has the time, budget, or need for the all-too-common planning processes that produce too much paper (including consultants’ invoices) and too little action. If you are ready to define and connect your vision to limited (and therefore effective) operating guidance and then start implementing a plan worthy of the term “strategic” and if you are willing learn as you go, we can help you get started. 

RESOURCES

We would like to help every organization make the most if its time and resources, but our own time is limited, so we don't think we'll be losing too much business to share our "recommended reading" for organizational leaders who want to get going on their own. ​

• Good to Great, and Good to Great and the Social Sectors, are not recent, but we find that following--rigorously--a couple core principles holds up well even in a shifting external environment.

• Ecological Economics: A Workbook for Problem-Based Learning isn't all you need to become an an ecological-economics researcher, but it can certainly help you develop the perspective and an understanding of where such research can strengthen you program.

• Drawing from a wide range of literature and experience, we have developed our own materials and approach to done-in-a-day planning.  For that, you'll have to contact us.