Priceless or worthless / Timing: 5:55

Priceless or worthless

I’m Sian Morse-Jones and in this video, we’ll be looking at why it can be useful to put a value on nature’s
services.

In Lesson 1, you learned that nature provides a huge array of ecosystem services vital to human
survival. Valuing nature is about demonstrating the importance of these services to human well-being,
business and the economy so that nature’s values can be better factored into decisions. In essence, it’s
about making nature’s values more visible to decision-makers.

All too often, the value of ecosystems and the services they provide are not recognised nor included in
the cost of the products we derive from them. Ecosystem services are actually worth a huge amount of
money and also, they provide a vast array of health and social benefits. But we tend to only realise these
when we lose them1. For example, the price of the shrimp in the supermarket rarely includes the cost of
the mangroves that were cleared to make way for the shrimp farm. Clearing mangroves can reduce a
natural flood defense, leading to extra damage to homes and livelihoods when storms occur like the
Indian Ocean tsunami2. Studies have found that losing just 1 square kilometre of mangroves in Thailand
can increase storm damages by as much as half a million dollars per square kilometre3.

Nature provides many services free of charge to support production too. Most of our important food
crops are dependent upon animal pollination. In Costa Rica, natural forest-based pollinators have been
found to increase coffee yields by as much as 20% and improve quality, leading to direct financial
benefits to farmers4. In the UK economy, pollination services provide by bees and insects are estimated
to be worth over £400 million a year5.

Nature holds substantial values to people, socially and culturally too, and these values can be hugely
influential. For example, there have been instances in India and Australia where strong cultural and
spiritual values local communities hold for their sacred nature sites have been so great that they have
been protected despite the potential for huge economic benefits from mining6.

So why would we value nature? Despite wide acknowledgement that it’s important, it is regularly
overlooked and undervalued in decisions. Consequently, many ecosystems and their services they
provide have been lost or degraded, threatening their capacity to sustain us in the long run. And
demands for ecosystem services are set to increase with growing populations and increasing
consumption levels.

Balancing our development goals with the need to protect the environment requires difficult decisions.
By putting values on these services, we can weigh up the true costs and benefits of different courses of
action including who benefits and who loses, now and in the future, to enable more sustainable and
equitable choices.

Money has the advantage of being comparable across services and it’s also often a familiar metric,
making it incredibly useful for communicating to a wide audience and to gain traction with business and
policy makers. It can also be a really powerful communication tool to raise awareness and interest in the
incredible value of nature.

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A 1997 study put a value on global ecosystem services at around 33 trillion dollars per year, far higher
than global Gross Domestic Product7. And the figures have been more recently updated to 125 trillion
dollars per year8. These studies have been hugely successful in increasing awareness of nature’s values.

But money cannot capture everything. For example, there are many cultural services like spiritual values
that cannot be easily translated into monetary terms. So we need to remember that most economic
valuations are conservative.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the idea of putting a value on nature. Many believe nature has
value in its own right and should be conserved regardless of its value to anyone or anything else. These
are important and valid views; however, this intrinsic value of nature is essentially beyond measure. But
we can measure its extrinsic values or in other words, its contribution to human well-being as a
complementary way to help make the case for conservation.

Even so, valuation can be challenging - ecosystems and their processes are complex and it can be
difficult to place a value on their services. And there can be risks in using valuation for conservation
purposes. For example, when comparing the benefits and costs of conserving a pristine but remote
forest versus clearing it to extract a lucrative, high-value asset like oil or coal, an economic valuation
approach alone may not be sufficient to support a conservation outcome. And instead, other decisions
rules may need to be applied like the precautionary principle.

Concerns have been expressed that valuing nature will lead to its commodification, putting it at risk of
market forces. However, placing a value on nature is not the same as “putting a price” on it9. Valuation
simply provides an estimate of the benefits nature provides to society; there are lots of ways this
information can be used in decisions and interventions – some market-based and some not.
Importantly, where decisions need to be made about how we use nature, valuation is inevitable so by
doing this in an explicit and transparent way, the hope is that we can avoid nature being inadvertently
given a zero value.

Now join the forum to tell us what you think about valuing nature and in the next module, you’ll learn
more about how people are a vital part of conservation.

1
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.html
2
Temmerman S et al. (2013) Ecosystem-based coastal defence in the face of global change. Nature 504: 79–83
3
Barbier EB (2007) Valuing ecosystem services as productive inputs. Economic Policy 22:177–229
http://economicpolicy.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/49/178.abstract
4
Ricketts et al (2004) Economic value of tropical forest to coffee production. Proceedings of The National Academy
of Sciences of the USA 101 (34) http://www.pnas.org/content/101/34/12579.full.pdf+html

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5
UK NEA (2011) The UK National Ecosystem Assessment: Synthesis of the Key Findings. UNEP-WCMC, Cambridge
http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/Resources/tabid/82/Default.aspx
6
.Verschuuren B (2007) An overview of cultural and spiritual values in ecosystem management and conservation
strategies. In: Haverkort, B. and Rist, S. (eds) Endogenous Development and Bio-cultural Diversity, The Interplay of
Worldviews, Globalisation and Locality, Compas/CDE, series on Worldviews and Sciences, No 6, Leusden, The
Netherlands.
http://www.academia.edu/5969969/An_overview_of_cultural_and_spiritual_values_in_ecosystem_management_
and_conservation_strategies_An_overview_of_cultural_and_spiritual_values_in_ecosystem_management_and_c
onservation_strategies
7
Costanza R et al. (1997). The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 387, 253–260
8
Costanza R et al. (2014) Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 26:
152–158
9
Sukhdev P et al. (2014) The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB): Challenges and Responses. In: D.
Helm and C. Hepburn (eds), Nature in the Balance: The Economics of Biodiversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
http://img.teebweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/TEEB-Challenges-and-Responses.pdf