News in Japan - May

Japan:

80% of SDF big choppers couldn’t fly for Kumamoto mainly because they were undergoing emergency checks

Gov't to call for beefing up support for foreign visitors in disaster (Japan) Tourism organizations should get the picture of the locations of evacuation centers as well as hospitals that can accept foreigners, according to the planned request. The guidelines state examples of foreign language terms regarding evacuation and advice, and urge making use of volunteer interpreters and preparation of emergency meals that can be provided to Muslims.

Monetary Valuation Methods for the Benefits of Cyclones

The final step in this study was linking the benefits of cyclones as ecosystem services to known monetary valuation methods. 

The benefits of cyclones and their corresponding ecosystem service types were linked to two sources containing valuation methods: 1) the conceptual matrix and example methods of ecosystem service valuation from Pascual & Muradian (2010), and 2) the near 1500 valuation methods from studies in The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) database (Van der Ploeg & De Groot, 2010). In these sources, the valuation methods corresponding to cyclone benefits were categorized into five different approaches: cost based, stated preference, production based, revealed preference, and benefit transfer. All identified benefits were considered from the perspective of benefit to humans in order to be valued, including certain benefits from literature that were not directly classified as beneficial to humans. In these systems, these five valuation approaches are described as follows:

• Cost based approaches depend on the estimation of the costs of recreating the service by artificial means.

• Stated preference approaches apply surveys about a market with demand for services and hypothetical policy changes in the availability of these services. 

• Production based approaches estimate how much services improve resources or environmental qualities, lead to lower costs and prices of marketed goods, and thus enhance income or productivity. 

• Revealed preference approaches are based on observing individual choices in existing markets and services that are related to the services requiring valuation.

• Benefit transfer approaches rely on the outcomes of a previous valuation from an area with a comparable ecosystem to the study area. If these two are comparable, the value can be transferred, or certain adjustments to reflect local circumstances can be applied. 

The final results (see figure) show that the applied valuation methods for comparable services were mostly related to the identified provisioning services, and most of the valuation methods used were cost based, namely replacement costs, direct market pricing, and avoided costs.

The Benefits of Cyclones as Ecosystem Services

After the first step of identifying the known benefits of cyclones, we linked identified benefits from both literature and case studies to ecosystem services categories developed by the UNEP (2009). The accompanying definitions and examples of provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services are described as follows:

• Provisioning services are products obtained from ecosystems. Examples include food, freshwater, wood, fiber, genetic resources, medicines, energy, and fisheries.
• Regulating services help stabilize ecosystem processes and are benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes. Examples include climate regulation, natural hazard regulation, water regulation, water purification and waste treatment, and disease regulation.
• Supporting services underlie the production of all other ecosystem services and related to fundamental environmental processes. Impacts can be direct or indirect, and can occur over a long time. Examples include biomass production, production of atmospheric oxygen, soil formation and retention, nutrient cycling, primary production, water cycling, and provisioning of habitat.
• Cultural services are non-material benefits that people obtain from ecosystems, which could be recreational, spiritual, or religious variants. Examples include spiritual enrichment, intellectual development, reflection, religious experience, recreation, knowledge systems, social relations, aesthetic values, appreciation of nature, recreation, and ecotourism.

According to these definitions, we classified the benefits as in the image below:

The Benefits of Cyclones

It's been over a year since the World Water Forum in Korea, where one of the members of the typhoon committee argued the necessity of studying the benefits of cyclones, which I since then did. Preceding a presentation at the 7th International Conference on Water Resources and Environment Research  in Kyoto, June 5-9, I here provide an overview of the literary findings of benefits of cyclones.

Cyclones often cause heavy damages and destruction to infrastructure and human lives, but the potential benefits of cyclones remain understudied. Several of these benefits could serve as an integral part of ecosystem based disaster risk reduction plans, when viewed as ecosystem services. For this purpose, we examined how the benefits of cyclones could be valued as ecosystem services. In phase one of this study, we scrutinized existing studies regarding potential benefits of cyclones.

The image shows a compilation of the 14 benefits of cyclones as described in the gathered studies on the topic, which we organized by approximate location (troposphere, biosphere, epipelagic zone) and order (cause and effect) of occurrence. More details follow after the break below.