How much is biodiversity worth?

The Anthropocene, the age of human domination on Earth, has already begun, and with it humans seem to have started to believe that we can do almost anything with this planet, with no limits. With industrial revolution also began a destruction and overexploitation of the natural world, leading to the sixth massive species extinction. Nature has been traded for some economic growth, most of which even benefited only a narrow range of people. Luckily, people have started becoming aware of the natural disaster we are causing and a lot of effort has already been invested by some to change the course of the world to greater sustainability.

I often feel like we’ve forgotten where we have come from and on what we ultimately depend – nature. Nature and its biodiversity is still providing us with so many functions and services that, if we tried and even succeeded in replacing them with artificial solutions, the economic cost would be great. Let’s just mention a few: pollination provides us with the majority of food we eat and is worth about $ 190 billon, wetlands and beavers with their dams help regulate rivers and prevent floods, trees in forests help stabilize soil and reduce soil erosion, as well as absorb carbon and thus mitigate the climate change. Furthermore, there are also many cultural and spiritual values associated with nature, and its role for recreation is not negligible either.

Yet, most of these services are taken for granted and fly under the economic radars – nobody takes the role of nature into account and nobody pays her for her services. We just assume the services to be always present, and when we destroy an ecosystem and then miss those services, we are shocked. Often, such destruction of ecosystems for private short term gains leads to great public economic losses – for example, when mangroves are cut for shrimp fishing, there is a huge cost associated with the loss of wave protection and nursery fisheries that affects a large number of people, much larger than the group that gained the benefit.

Ecosystems also help with the regulation of the global climate and precipitation patterns. The amazon rainforest contains a lot of moisture which is blown south by the trade winds towards the large agricultural areas in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and part of Brazil. The rain, brought from the Amazon, enables high agricultural production from which a lot of economic profit comes. However, nobody pays for the rain that they received and which would be drastically reduced was the Amazon deforested. If a part of the profit from the agriculture was given back to the Amazon, it would help the poor locals survive and make them less dependent on strictly natural resources to survive, therefore decreasing the deforestation pressures in the area.

Although I have mostly been talking about ecosystem services, the efficiency of those highly depends on biodiversity – the more diverse an ecosystem, the more productive and stable it normally is. This not only includes plant diversity, as they are often seen as the main service providers, but also animals on all trophic levels, as they help to stabilise and maintain that plant diversity. Thus, even the species that do not have any direct role in providing a service are still important for the efficiency of its delivery and should not be neglected.

Some people argue that the biodiversity has such a large intrinsic value that it should not be given an economic value, as it sells it off, making it like any other economic goods that can be traded, as well as underestimates its true value. I deeply agree with this standpoint, as where does our right to destroy the natural world and the species we share it come from? Even if we are the most developed and intelligent creatures to ever have inhabited this planet, we do not own it. That being said, I do think that putting  a price tag on biodiversity could help us conserve nature better.

We have been relying on the intrinsic value of nature for a long time to help us conserve it, but it doesn’t seem to be working, as species are still going extinct, and conservation is always lacking money to save them. In the capitalist world it seems that the intrinsic value is often simply ignored or overlooked. By valuing biodiversity economically, any plans to destroy nature for financial profit would have to take into account the costs of doing so, making many of them unprofitable, hence they would not be continued. It would simply force people to acknowledge nature and its importance to us more. Much more might also be invested in the restoration of various ecosystems, as they might provide services cheaper than any engineering solutions would. By paying for all the services the nature provides us, more could also be invested into development of the poor local communities, reducing their pressure on nature, or it could also be used for conservation and ecosystem management purposes, enabling it to self-fund rather than always be dependent on voluntary donations of those people that care.

In an ideal world, biodiversity and nature would be such large values that conservation would not even be needed as we would take good enough care since always. However, sadly we do not live in such a world, and even though the intrinsic value of biodiversity will always be greater than any number written as a benefit from its services on paper, that value is better than zero. Currently, it is zero, just because we take our planet and our nature for granted. 

References:
Seddon, N. et al. 2016. The value of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Proc.R. Soc. B. 283.
Naeem, S. et al. 2016. Biodiversity as a multidimensional construct: a review, framework and multidimensional case study of herbivory's impact on plant biodiversity
Malhi, Y. (2017) Defining the concept of the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 42, 77-104.
Pavan, S. (2011). Put a value on nature!. [video] Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/pavan_sukhdev_what_s_the_price_of_nature [Accessed 27 Mar. 2018].