These Researchers Are Working to Quantify the Value of Nature |
Research highlights how the services nature provides are waning as it is degraded.Marco Simonini/REDA/Universal Images Group/Getty via Inside Climate News
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In an era of rapid globalization, economic growth has come with trade-offs. To make room for urban development or fossil fuel extraction, countries often clear forests, pollute water and decimate wildlife populations.
However, while nations and businesses build lucrative markets around these activities, destroying nature often comes at a cost—literally. Natural resources underpin the global economy, from pollinators supporting agricultural supply chains to forests ensuring water quality and availability. One estimate suggests that more than half of the world’s gross domestic product is moderately or highly dependent on the environment.
Research shows the services that nature provides are diminishing as we degrade it. Now, a growing number of economists and ecologists around the world are helping decisionmakers understand the full extent of the contributions to local and national economies made by plants, animals, or entire ecosystems—and what’s at risk financially if they are lost.
Since time immemorial, humans have relied on natural resources like clean water, forests, and soil to prop up economies. As Stanford University ecologist Lisa Mandle put it to me bluntly, “if there were no nature, there would be no economy.”
But it wasn’t until fairly recently that experts formally started to catalogue the environment’s financial contributions to society through an approach dubbed “natural capital accounting.” In 2005, a report compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world, which was called for by the United Nations, estimated that human activities had driven the decline of two-thirds of ecosystem services on Earth, including freshwater supply, climate-change mitigation, and disease control.
Pollinators contribute $800 billion in gross economic value annually, including $34 billion in the United States.
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