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Taking High Conservation Value from Forests to Freshwaters

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Abstract

The high conservation value (HCV) concept, originally developed by the Forest Stewardship Council, has been widely incorporated outside the forestry sector into companies’ supply chain assessments and responsible purchasing policies, financial institutions’ investment policies, and numerous voluntary commodity standards. Many, if not most, of these newer applications relate to production practices that are likely to affect freshwater systems directly or indirectly, yet there is little guidance as to whether or how HCV can be applied to water bodies. We focus this paper on commodity standards and begin by exploring how prominent standards currently address both HCVs and freshwaters. We then highlight freshwater features of high conservation importance and examine how well those features are captured by the existing HCV framework. We propose a new set of freshwater ‘elements’ for each of the six values and suggest an approach for identifying HCV Areas that takes out-of-fence line impacts into account, thereby spatially extending the scope of existing methods to define HCVs. We argue that virtually any non-marine HCV assessment, regardless of the production sector, should be expanded to include freshwater values, and we suggest how to put those recommendations into practice.

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Notes

  1. We are employing the term ecolabel to encapsulate all social and environmental standards, especially those that have been developed through multi-stakeholder based approaches, such as International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling (ISEAL) Alliance members.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants at a 2010 International Congress for Conservation Biology workshop—Will Darwall, Steven Price, Nick Salafsky, Rinjan Shrethra, James Snider, Jim Strittholt, and Michele Thieme—who provided guidance on the direction of this work. Lindsay Spurrier developed the freshwater HCV schematic (Fig. 1). Diane Gray, Christian Knoch, Michael Tlusty and Trevor Mia provided reference support. Helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript were provided by Stuart Orr, Anders Lindhe, and James Snider, and the authors are grateful for reviews by Nigel Dudley and two anonymous reviewers. The authors thank Sealed Air (formerly JohnsonDiversey), Ecolab, and The Coca-Cola Company for support during the development of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, USA

    Robin Abell

  2. Natural Resources Division, SCS Global Services, 2000 Powell St., Suite 600, Emeryville, CA, 94608, USA

    Siân K. Morgan

  3. Project Seahorse, AERL, University of British Columbia, 2202 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Siân K. Morgan

  4. WWF-International, Av. du Mont-Blanc, Gland, 1196, Switzerland

    Alexis J. Morgan

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  1. Robin Abell
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Correspondence to Robin Abell.

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Abell, R., Morgan, S.K. & Morgan, A.J. Taking High Conservation Value from Forests to Freshwaters. Environmental Management 56, 1–10 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-015-0472-6

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