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Abstract
Talk to a group of ecologists these days and you might hear about economic trends and market values instead of furry animals at risk or our moral obligation to conserve what nature has provided. Don't get me wrong. These ecologists still think we should conserve nature, they are just using a different language to convey the idea. Of course, not everyone agrees that it's a better approach or that it's just language.
| Since we rely on it, the environment has monetary value. |
The theory behind the economic approach to conservation is simple. We rely every day on the services and commodities resulting from a healthy ecosystem; therefore, we need to realize their monetary value and treat them accordingly. Like any other commodity or service, the more necessary and scarce the service, the higher its economic value will be. In other words, the things we absolutely need, like fresh air and clean water, will have a high value, as will those resources that are scarce or are becoming scarce, like giant pandas.
Several of the ecologists using this approach, including Robert Costanza at the University of Maryland, say that they are just formalizing something we do all the time. "You can't avoid the issue of valuation because every time you make a trade-off, every time you make a decision that affects the environment, you are implicitly valuing those parts of the environment that you affect," says Costanza. "What we are really talking about is making those trade-offs more transparent."
| Look at environmental costs and benefits. |
Without this transparency, Costanza says "the decisions are much worse than they need to be." In his opinion, when policy makers and the public have access to valuation data and look directly at the environmental costs and benefits, better decisions get made.
A very tangible example of the success of this sort of approach comes from New York City's water supply. In the mid-1990s, the city was faced with declining water quality and had two options to correct the situation: They could restore the watershed in the Catskill Mountains, which naturally filters the water through a system of roots and soil, or they could build a new water purification plant. Cost estimates indicated that improving the watershed would require a one-time cost of $1-1.5 billion to buy land surrounding the watershed and to rejuvenate the native ecosystem. In contrast, building a new purification system was estimated to cost $6-8 billion, with an annual maintenance cost of approximately $300 million. The choice was obvious: Restoring the natural ecosystem was significantly less expensive, saving the city billions of dollars, and had the side benefit of improving the ecology of the area.
| The choice is obvious only if you have all the information. |
However, proponents of this approach point out that the choice is obvious only if you have all of the information. This is part of what they are trying to demonstrate with the numbers. We need to realize the value of ecosystem services before we reach a critical juncture at which point the services no longer exist and we are suffering for it.
But even with valuation data available, not all choices are as obvious as the New York City one. For example, Claire Kremen (of Stanford University) and colleagues compared the costs and benefits of preserving forest resources in Madagascar to the costs and benefits of harvesting them at the current rate of consumption. The authors found that while the local and global communities benefited most from resource preservation, the state benefited more from resource consumption. How can such a conflict be resolved, and whose interests are paramount?
| To encourage conservation, make it financially worthwhile. |
According to Gretchen Daily, an author on the study, "The Madagascar case mainly points to the need for a much more integrated way of looking at these problems. Right now we are kind of doing everything on a piece by piece basis, even if you look at the global level. What we advocate in that paper," she continues, "is that through the clean development mechanism in the Kyoto Protocol, we could help bring these contrasting incentives into alignment and make it beneficial for the Malagasy government to go for conservation. But unless you've got an integrated approach, it is never really going to work."
In other words, if the global population wants to save Madagascar's forests, then we need to find a way to make it financially worthwhile to the state government. And this requires an understanding on the larger population's part that the services provided by the natural environment in Madagascar are worth paying for.
| "We live in a world of gross inequities north to south." |
Interestingly this example points out another problem with the valuation approach: The unequal distribution of wealth, especially between the northern and southern hemispheres. "We live in a world of gross inequities north to south," says Richard Norgaard, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the current president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. "A lot of environmental solutions entail rich people planting forests in the poor's land to sequester carbon, so the rich can keep living richly. We are not living in an economy that is ideal and when [ecologists] start going out and doing valuations in the economy that we have, it is going to perpetuate the [existing] inequities. We need," Norgaard continues, "to solve the distribution question simultaneously with the conservation question, otherwise we perpetuate the inequities of today."
But even with the imperfections of the system, Norgaard and others like him think that estimating the value of ecosystem services is important. After all, putting a dollar value on something provides a starting point for deeper discussion and a way to communicate with an otherwise disenfranchised public.
| "Economic language reinforces corporate power." |
Norgaard notes, however, that there is an inherent irony or conflict in using the language of economics in conservation efforts. "Economic language is the language we use in politics and it reinforces corporate power," he says. Because of this and the fact that the numbers are based in a less than perfect economy, we must question the numbers as they are presented or we are in effect "supporting the very system that is destroying nature."
Not all ecologists, or even most of them, have adopted this economic valuation approach. A recent article in Wild Earth by Michael Soulé is highly critical of the efforts to link conservation and development. He concludes that in most cases sustainable development is simply not compatible with conservation.
| Some think an economic focus is incompatible with ecology. |
According to Norgaard, there are some conservation biologists who see this marriage between economics and ecology as an untenable compromise of their values, that it is a less pure statement of the real value of nature.
In contrast to that extreme view is the extreme exercise Costanza and colleagues published in 1997, in which they estimated the total value of the biosphere and compared it to the world's total gross national products (GNPs). The natural services of the biosphere were estimated to be minimally worth $15-54 trillion annually as compared to the GNP for that year only being worth $20-25 trillion. In Costanza's words, "we are talking about something that is almost certainly larger than the current GNP and therefore something we need to pay a lot more attention to."
Rabiya S. Tuma is a freelance science writer based in Oregon and New York.
Andrzej Krauze is an illustrator, poster maker, cartoonist, and painter who illustrates regularly for HMS Beagle, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, Bookseller, and New Statesman.
Biodiversity Economics Site - offers resources describing the policies and tools of environmental valuation as well as related events and links. From the World Conservation Union.
Ecosystem Valuation - a resource for non-economists. Provides a general overview and discussion of the methods involved in valuation, plus extensive links.
National Center for Environmental Economics - includes both detailed research information and general educational topics. From the Environmental Protection Agency.
Developing a Scientific Basis for Managing Earth's Life Support Systems - an article from Gretchen Daily that discusses economic choices in conservation. From the December 1999 issue of Conservation Ecology.
Stanford Study Supports Novel Rainforest Protection Plan - a more detailed discussion of the findings of Kremen et al.
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