Taking high conservation value from forests to freshwaters.

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.

Ecosystem service information to benefit sustainability standards for commodity supply chains.

The growing base of information about ecosystem services generated by ecologists, economists, and other scientists could improve the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of commodity-sourcing standards being adopted by corporations to mitigate risk in their supply chains and achieve sustainability goals. This review examines various ways that information about ecosystem services could facilitate compliance with and auditing of commodity-sourcing standards. We also identify gaps in the current state of knowledge on the ecological effectiveness of sustainability standards and demonstrate how ecosystem-service information could complement existing monitoring efforts to build credible evidence. This paper is a call to the ecosystem-service scientists to engage in this decision context and tailor the information they are generating to the needs of the standards community, which we argue would offer greater efficiency of standards implementation for producers and enhanced effectiveness for standard scheme owners and corporations, and should thus lead to more sustainable outcomes for people and nature.

Volunteer environmental monitoring and the role of the universities: the case of Citizens' Environment Watch.

Universities can provide a stable home for launching collaborative community research projects. Citizens' Environment Watch (CEW), an environmental monitoring initiative based at the University of Toronto, has made significant contributions to environmental education and stewardship in Ontario, Canada. Following dramatic cuts in provincial monitoring programs, citizens and youth have used chemical parameters and biological indicators to gauge water and air quality, and to identify areas requiring remediation and pollution prevention efforts. The relationship of Citizens' Environment Watch to government agencies, funders and other grassroots environmental groups has evolved over the past 5 years as CEW attempts to remain effective without taking on the investigative and enforcement roles to support the regulatory enforcement that has been largely abandoned by government. We explore the challenges inherent in developing and maintaining a volunteer organization that carries out rigorous and useful scientific work and we outline the ability of a university to help overcome these critical challenges. Finally, we present lessons learned for the benefit of other citizen and youth monitoring projects.