Gretchen Daily

Career

In 1992, Daily was awarded the Winslow/Heinz Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. In 1995 Daily became the Bing Interdisciplinary Research Scientist in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. During her time as a research scientist, Daily served as the editor of Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, a foundational book that lays out the framework used widely today for understanding the benefits of nature to people, with numerous examples and ways of considering their value. The Heinz Foundation noted that Nature's Services "has served as a model for ecosystems regulation in several regions of the world and was a catalyst for the U.N.'s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment."

After 7 years as a research scientist, Daily was appointed as an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and as a senior fellow at the Institute of International Studies (both at Stanford University) in 2002. In 2002, Daily published the book The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Katherine Ellison. She has since published a dozen further books, including The Power of Trees (2012) and One Tree (2018) with Charles J. Katz, Green Growth that Works: Natural Capital Policy and Finance Mechanisms from Around the World (2019) with Lisa Mandle, Zhiyun Ouyang, and James Salzman, and Rural Livelihood and Environmental Sustainability in China (2020) with Jie Li, Shuzhuo Li, and Marcus Feldman.

In 2005, Daily was appointed as the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and was made the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. As of 2020, Daily serves in all three of these positions.

In 2005, Daily (the project leader from Stanford), along with partners at The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund, established the Natural Capital Project. The organization's stated goal is to "improve the well-being of people and our planet by motivating targeted investments in nature." In later years, the core partnership expanded to include the University of Minnesota, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Stockholm Resilience Center, together with over three hundred collaborating institutions. Its signature software, InVEST, is open source, co-developed with users, and now used in 185 countries to reveal the values of nature in specific decisions, and the risks and costs of its loss. As co-founder and Stanford faculty director of the Natural Capital Project, Daily "serves as [the organization's] chief emissary to financial and government leaders." In 2006, Daily became a member of the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy. Daily served as the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in Sustainability Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Research

Daily's academic profile at the Center for Conservation Biology states that "Daily’s scientific research is on countryside biogeography and the future dynamics of biodiversity change." In an interview, Daily remarked that "'Countryside biogeography' is a new conceptual framework for elucidating the fates of populations, species, and ecosystems in ‘countryside’ – the growing fraction of Earth's unbuilt land surface whose ecosystem qualities are strongly influenced by humanity." To forecast what elements of nature will survive into the future, Daily studies the capacity of nature reserves and agricultural systems to sustain plants, animals, insects, and other organisms.

Using findings from research done in countryside biogeography, Daily, and researchers like her, is attempting to determine what "species are most important and most merit protection" and "what is the scientific basis for deciding" the relative importance of species within a given ecosystem. When asked "which species/systems most merit protection?" Daily responded that she is "actively attempting to link projected changes in biodiversity and ecosystems to changes in 'services' to humanity." She went on to cite "production of goods," "life-support processes," "life-fulfilling conditions" and "options (genetic diversity for future use)" as the services that ecosystems/species provide for people. To characterize the values of nature and the risks and costs of its loss, she advances the interdisciplinary science of ecosystem services, the benefits of nature to people.

As one of the co-founders of the Natural Capital Project, Daily employs her research practically by working "with private landowners, economists, lawyers, business people, and government agencies to incorporate environmental issues into business practice and public policy."

Author

The Stork and the Plow

In this book, together with Anne Howland Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich, published in 1995 by Yale University Press, the authors look at the interaction between population and food supply and offer a strategy for balancing human numbers with nutritional needs. Their proposals include improving the status of women by giving them equal education, reducing racism and religious prejudice, reforming the agricultural system, and shrinking the growing gap between rich and poor.

This generation faces a set of challenges unprecedented in their scope and severity and in the shortness of time left to resolve them. . . . The Stork and the Plow sets these out thoughtfully [and] accurately. . . . We can all hope this urgent message is carefully heeded.

— Henry W. Kendall, Nobel laureate and Julius A. Stratton Professor of Physics, MIT

Nature's Services

Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems was published in 1997 by Island Press. Nature's Services starts off with an introduction from Daily titled "What are Ecosystem Services" and another introductory piece by Harold Mooney and Paul Ehrlich that seeks to detail the "fragmentary history" of ecosystem services. After the introductions, the book is split into four distinct sections that address different elements of ecosystem services.

The first section of the book address the economic issues involved in assigning value to ecosystem services in the first place. The next two sections outline different kinds of services that can be provided by nature, "Overarching Services" and "Services Supplied by Major Biomes." The overarching services section includes papers like "Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning" by David Tilman, "Ecosystem Services Supplied by Soil" by Daily, Pamela Matson and Peter Vitousek and "Services Provided by Pollinators" by Gary Nabhan and Stephen Buchmann The "Services Provided by Major Biomes" section includes papers regarding topics like "Marine Ecosystems" by Charles Peterson and Jane Lubchenco and "The World's Forests and their Ecosystem Services" by Norman Myers

The last section of the book includes case studies which showcase different services that distinct ecosystems provide to people around the world. Examples include: "Water Quality Improvements by Wetlands" by Katherine Ewel and "Ecosystem Services in a Modern Economy: Gunnison County, Colorado" by Andrew Wilcox and John Harte. In the conclusion of the book, Daily remarks that the "core analyses presented in this book attempt to value ecosystems and their component species only insofar as they confer benefits, in the form of life-support goods and services, to human beings" but that this "focus does not in any way preclude making decisions on the basis of other values as well."

In his review of the book, James Salzman concluded that Nature's Services, in contrast with efforts like the Endangered Species Act, "takes a different, potentially more effective tack, calling for explicit recognition of ecosystem services because of the direct, tangible benefits they provide. Such recognition could provide a more integrated and compelling basis for action than those suggested by a single-species or biodiversity protection for the simple reason that the impacts of those services on humans are more immediate and undeniably important."

The New Economy of Nature

The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable was co-written by Daily and Katherine Ellison and was published in 2002 by Island Press. The book presents different cases studies where companies or governments were able to actually profit from their conservation efforts. One chapter describes how New York "decided to meet federal requirements to improve water quality with a less expensive, though more controversial, option of protecting watershed integrity through land purchases and development limits, rather than adopt the technological solution of a multibillion dollar treatment facility." While another chapter offers "an assessment of plans to manage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developing a worldwide system of carbon trading patterned on the U.S. experience with pollution."

Kenneth Arrow remarked that Daily and Ellison "have delineated the new movement to make conservation of natural resources financially rewarding and illustrate in a lively and probing manner many cases of profitable activities that also preserve the biosphere."

In his review of the book, Patrick Wilson stated that "The most notable contribution of The New Economy of Nature is its balanced message, optimistic and cautious." He goes on to say that the book "avoids the fallacy that the market is the solution to our environmental protection challenges and that, if allowed to operate free of government intervention, it can somehow make the policymaking choices less problematic and the tradeoffs less daunting" and that "it challenges elements of environmental orthodoxy that hold that the market, because of its short-term orientation and emphasis on profit over conservation, is an intrinsic threat to nature and the only solution is increased government oversight and financial commitment."

Green Growth That Works

Green Growth That Works: Natural Capital Policy and Finance Mechanisms from Around the World was published in 2019 by Island Press.