Ecosystem Services

We manage 20.3 million acres of timberland in the U.S., Canada, Uruguay and China. As part of our 2020 sustainability goal to maintain or enhance the ecosystem services provided by our timberlands, and to help us and our stakeholders understand the full range of values our timberlands offer, we developed a plan to measure and report against a comprehensive set of 18 ecosystem services our forests provide. We adopted the terminology used by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA)¹, which separates ecosystem services into four categories: provisioning services, regulating services, supporting services and cultural services. Each of these describes different types of benefits nature provides to people.

We started with the belief that our practices maintain or improve the ecosystem services associated with our managed forests. We brainstormed a list of ecosystem services designed to test that hypothesis. We then categorized them according to the four MEA services. We searched for relevant indicators using published literature and ecosystem service reports and tools, with the caveat that the reporting unit had to be readily available (e.g., either publically available or already collected internally) and not proprietary in the reported form. The process was a collaborative effort among our scientists, operating managers and staff and was supported by all levels of the company.

These services will be measured and reported annually, beginning in 2013, allowing us to gain valuable insight into the benefits provided by our lands. Some of these services already produce products and services with market value; some may provide opportunities for additional revenue or marketing potential; and some, although not measurable in dollars, will illustrate the range of values that accompany our managed forests. In all three cases, collecting and tracking this information should also help us translate these benefits into value for our customers, communities and other interested stakeholders.

Provisioning

These services, often described as ecosystem goods, represent the tangible benefits provided by an ecosystem. Many of these services are relatively easy to quantify because they have a market value.

Regulatory

These services represent the ecosystem processes that are needed to maintain human health and infrastructure. This category is often more difficult to quantify because the processes are intangible and are mostly considered public goods.

Supporting

These are the services that enable the other categories to work, and they include such things as soil formation, nutrient cycling, primary production and water cycling. Habitat provision can also be categorized under supporting services because habitat supports biodiversity, which is an indicator of the functionality of an ecosystem and the other ecosystem services.² A supporting service can also be described as an ecosystem process.³

Cultural

This category of ecosystem services is intended to convey intangible values people derive from ecosystems.

Additional Services

We identified some services that do not lend themselves to annual data collection and reporting. These “snapshot” services are excluded from the annual data collection because we have only qualitative information, the reporting unit is not sufficiently precise, or the service has been recently discontinued. Nevertheless, these services are important reflections of the value provided by Weyerhaeuser timberlands, and will lend themselves to fuller description in the future, if not annual tracking.

These additional services include the following:

• Oxygen Production
• Natural Pollination
• Genetic Resources/Germplasm preservation
• Biochemical
• Water Purification
• Pest Resistance
• Cultural- Sense of Place (grazing)
• Cultural- Sense of Place (first nation hunting grounds)

1. Called for in 2000 by the UN Secretary General in partnership with UN agencies, conventions, business, non-governmental organization with a multi-stakeholder board of directions, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment represents the largest assessment of the health of the Earth’s ecosystems to date. It was published in 2005 and was prepared by 1360 experts from 95 countries.
2. Some authors categorize biodiversity as an element of biophysical supply rather than an ecosystem service. See Tallis, Heather and Stephen Polasky. 2009. Mapping and Valuing Ecosystem Services as an Approach for Conservation and Natural-Resource Management. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1162: 265–283.
3. Brown, Thomas C., John C. Bergstrom and John B. Loomis. 2007. Defining, Valuing, and Providing Ecosystem Goods and Services. Natural Resources Journal 47: 229-376.