WILLIAM CLARK, Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University¹
THOMAS JORLING, Vice President, International Paper Company²
WILLIAM MERRELL, President, The Heinz Center

This prototype report on the State of the Nation's Ecosystems lays the foundation for what we hope will evolve into a comprehensive, credible series of periodic reports on the state of America's ecosystems.

Our goals for this prototype are to explain our approach to the design of such a report, to illustrate what it might contain and look like, and to elicit feedback that will improve the design of the first full edition of the State of the Nation's Ecosystems, scheduled for release in 2001.

The need for a report such as this was recognized at least three decades ago. Virtually every comprehensive study on national environmental protection has called for more coherent and comprehensive information on the state of our environment. The first annual report of the Council on Environmental Quality in 1970 noted that efforts of that time did "not provide the type of information or coverage necessary to evaluate the condition of the Nation's environment or to chart changes in its quality and trace their causes." Similar sentiments were subsequently expressed by the National Academy of Sciences; the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government; and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.

Today, the federal government spends several hundred millions dollars per year collecting environmental data and, through regulation, imposes monitoring obligations on emission and effluent sources. State governments, private industry, and environmental organizations have mounted substantial efforts as well. Although these efforts provide important information on specific problems and places, there is still no single source for comprehensive, consistent, and reliable information about the overall state of U.S. ecosystems. For a nation deeply committed to protecting the environment, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. It is as though we would seek to develop sound economic policy without having reliable measures of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), unemployment, or inflation rate, relying instead on idiosyncratic reports from individual firms, sectors, and local chambers of commerce.

In 1995, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) began an effort to increase coordination among federal environmental monitoring programs. That interagency project examined the full range of federal monitoring programs and developed a conceptual framework for their integration. At the same time, it was evident that increased coordination must be accompanied by the dissemination of key monitoring results in a form that was accessible to a broad range of decision makers and other interested individuals. All involved agreed on the need for a periodic, focused report to the American people on the state of the Nation's ecosystems. OSTP asked the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to take the lead in developing such a report.

The Center was guided by four fundamental principles in responding to the OSTP request:

1) The report must be scientifically credible. Too many previous efforts were disregarded because they were perceived as willing to accept any data available or as reflecting conclusions not based on sound science. The report's content must meet the highest standards of scientific peer review.

2) The report, and the process of developing it, must be nonpartisan. Too many previous reporting efforts failed because they were perceived to be politicized or to be promoting the perspectives of particular interests. Any hope for greater success depends on this new effort being seen as fair and unbiased by a broad cross-section of political interests.

3) Such a report must engage the expertise and experience of the Nation's environmental monitoring programs and professionals. Any attempt to characterize the state of the Nation's ecosystems will fail without the cooperation of those engaged full time in the exacting business of ecosystem monitoring and reporting. At the same time, a useful, comprehensive report would have to be discriminating in its choice of which measurements to feature.

4) Any useful report on the state of the nation's ecosystems must benefit from ongoing experimentation and learning. No effort as ambitious as this could be expected to get everything right the first time around. Any hope for success depends on the report's authors being allowed to make mistakes, and to learn from them.

To implement these principles, The Heinz Center assembled a small in-house staff and a larger team of collaborators from environmental organizations, industry, academia, and government agencies. A Design Committee, with members drawn from all of these groups, oversaw the entire project and made crucial decisions regarding approach, content, and format. The Heinz Center, in turn, convened three technical Work Groups to identify measures for particular ecosystems and develop the data, analysis, and presentation materials included in the prototype report. Finally, a high-level Advisory Committee reviewed the project approach, with special consideration to ensuring broad and balanced representation. Altogether, more than 50 individuals have participated as committee members, with many more involved as contributors, reviewers, and advisors. Names and affiliations of collaborators are listed in Collaborators, Funding, and Acknowledgments. Additional participants will be recruited as additional ecosystems are added between now and the publication of the first full Report in the year 2001.

The State of the Nation's Ecosystems has been created through an intense and iterative process that began in December 1997, continues with the publication of this prototype, and will extend though responses to the feedback that we hope this Report will elicit. At its initial meetings, the Design Committee reviewed the historical experience of analogous efforts in other nations and at national, regional, and local scales in the United States. Based on this review, the Committee developed a design strategy that guided production of the present document.

Central elements of the strategy, all of which are open to revision in response to comments on this prototype report, are summarized below:

1) The prime audience for the Report consists of decision makers and opinion leaders concerned about the overall state of the Nation's environment. In addition, the Report seeks to educate a broader audience by highlighting important ecosystem conditions and the pattern of change in those conditions. To reach these diverse audiences and facilitate revisions, the Committee designed the report from the outset as both a hypertext document, to be published on the World Wide Web, and a printed version.

2) The Report seeks to develop a succinct set of strategic measurements that characterize the Nation's ecosystems, much as measures of GDP, unemployment, and inflation characterize the U.S. economy. The Report does not seek to characterize every aspect of the environment or the ecosystems of particular regions. It aims to complement, not replace, existing reports on particular places and properties of the environment.

3) The Report will focus on the state of the Nation's ecosystems, rather than environmental pressures that might change that state, or on the actions of government, private individuals, or businesses that might seek to affect that state. While information on pressures and responses clearly has its uses, the interpretation of such data presents additional challenges to the scientific credibility and political legitimacy of a reporting effort. The Design Committee therefore decided to limit the Report to the single, crucial task of characterizing the status of the Nation's ecosystems. The Committee is confident that there is no shortage of groups both within and outside government that would use a credible, unbiased Report on the State of the Nation's Ecosystems in their own efforts to interpret, change, or design policy.

4) The Report seeks to characterize a broad range of goods and services (e.g., food and fiber) derived from ecosystems as well as properties relating to ecosystem condition or integrity (e.g., native species, nutrient cycling). Different people have different interests in ecosystems, and not everyone values the same things. The Committee sought to include an intelligent selection of ecosystem characteristics that people in all sectors of society feel most strongly about, within the overall constraints of succinctness noted above.

5) The Report will provide reliable information on which decisions can be based, but it will avoid normative evaluations or policy recommendations. It thus seeks to be policy relevant while avoiding the politically fatal appearance of bias or advocacy. To assist readers in interpreting its content, the Report will, wherever possible, include time trends and maps from which regional comparisons can be made. When necessary, the Report will characterize conditions in terms of departures from generally accepted standards (e.g., safe drinking water standards), while recognizing the judgments inherent in such standards.

6) The Report will identify critical gaps in data and monitoring programs that need to be filled in order to characterize fully the state of the Nation's ecosystems. The Design Committee rejected the option of simply reporting available data. Instead, the Report development process began with the identification of those ecosystem characteristics judged to be most important for a national report, followed by a good faith effort to locate sufficiently high-quality and extensive data on those characteristics. Where such data are not currently available, the Report displays a conspicuous blank space, calling attention to the gap. The Committee recognized, however, that evaluating how best to fill data gaps identified by the Report is not within its purview. Responsibility for addressing these gaps lies with the larger scientific, professional, and political community that administers and oversees such efforts. It is clear to us, however, that there are existing resources which, if properly directed, could enhance the reliable and durable monitoring of the Nation's ecosystems.

7) The Report will be produced through an iterative process that encourages and embraces critical feedback from academia, industry, environmental organizations, government, and the community of professionals involved in ecosystem monitoring and reporting. In particular, working documents generated during the Report development process have been made widely available, and a prototype Report (the version presented here) should be released to elicit comments and suggestions for improvements in the first full edition, due out in 2001. The 2001 Report should also incorporate provisions for its own review and revision.

This development strategy was implemented by the Design Committee, technical Work Groups, and outside collaborators during 1998 and 1999. The Design Committee developed an initial set of candidate reporting measures, with careful attention to assuring that the proposed set was both scientifically defensible and politically fair. These candidate measures were reviewed by an ad-hoc group of distinguished ecologists assembled at Stanford University in April 1998. At this early stage in its deliberations, the Committee also added to its membership the chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Indicators for Monitoring Aquatic and Terrestrial Environments, which was simultaneously exploring the scientific foundations for a comprehensive set of national ecosystem indicators.

The set of candidate measures emerging from these discussions, together with proposed standards for data quality and coverage, served as a starting point for an iterative discussion with the technical Work Groups, which were assembled to provide expertise in specific monitoring systems and data availability. Design Committee members chaired each Work Group to assure continuity and facilitate communication. Through the second half of 1998 and into early 1999, Work Groups and the Design Committee evaluated the feasibility and appropriateness of the proposed measures and worked to develop the organizing framework of 12 major ecosystem goods, services, and properties that is the core of this Report. Subsequent negotiations among the Design Committee, Work Groups, and outside experts produced the set of basic measures presented in this document. The Work Groups then set to work mobilizing, analyzing, and summarizing the data needed for the Report.

Following completion of the first round of data acquisition and analysis, individual sections and subsequently full drafts of the Report were distributed to outside experts for review. More than 40 reviewers from academia, industry, environmental organizations, and government agencies commented on the proposed measures and data sets. The reviewers' input resulted in significant modification of the Report's format and content. However, given the consensus process by which the draft was developed, suggestions for new or alternative indicators were deferred for consideration during completion of the first full Report. These and other suggestions will be addressed in a comment section of the Report website (www.us-ecosystems.org).

In addition, The Heinz Center sought wide distribution of, and encouraged comment on, project materials. Throughout the project, briefings were held with business leaders, environmental and conservation organizations, federal agencies, professional societies, and Congressional staff. On three occasions, written summaries were printed for wide distribution. All such materials, plus summaries of all Design Committee and Work Group meetings, have been made available on The Heinz Center web site.

Work continues towards the first full State of the Nation's Ecosystems, targeted for completion in 2001. That report will refine the content of the current prototype and add measures describing freshwater systems, arid lands and rangelands, and cities and suburbs. Reactions to this prototype will strongly influence the form and content of the 2001 report, fulfilling the design principle outlined above--to learn from mistakes, and to use that learning to improve our product.

¹ Mr. Clark is the Chair of the Design Committee overseeing this project, and a member of the project Advisory Committee, and a member of the Board of Trustees of The Heinz Center.

² Mr. Jorling is Chair of the project Advisory Committee