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WANTED: BEAUTIFUL MINDS TO PUT A PRICE ON THE PRICELESS. Do economists hold the key to saving the planet?
Robert Lamb, producer of dev.tv’s upcoming Nature Inc. series on the background
Some scientists are, indeed, deeply pessimistic about our chances of keeping the living fabric of life sufficiently intact to avoid economic and social breakdown. Take population. Our human numbers increase by 200,000 a day. The biggest growth by far takes place in the desperately poor places of our world. Poor people are – unwittingly – as destructive as the rich. A billion people – one in every six – depend directly on their environment for energy (wood or charcoal), water (from a river or a village well) and sustenance (soil and fish). These desperately poor people are living a lifestyle of self-immolation. Are we to be the locusts who gobble everything in sight and then perish? Where can the dramatic, ‘to scale’ change – impossible to attain according to those like Lovelock – come from? Oddly enough, the dismal science, economics, might come to our collective rescue. There is a new breed of economist beginning to be heard in serious places such as the World Bank. Five years ago Professor Robert Costanza and his team at the University of Vermont priced the services that nature provides to the global economy at around US$ 33 trillion – at that time, more than the combined wealth of every economy on earth. Underestimating Nature When I interviewed Costanza recently he told me the calculation is a serious underestimate. Nature’s services, he says, are a public good… “We do need to recognise they are valuable relative to a private good and if we don’t recognise that we over-exploit and deplete them to our social dis-benefit”. We have left nature off the books. And that is possibly the greatest white-collar crime of the last century. But would it make any difference if we were to put a monetary value on services watersheds or coral reefs or swamps give us? That’s what we’ll be asking in a new series, Nature Inc., which will be shown first on the BBC this June. Bloom or bust In our first programme we feature the honeybee and show how utterly dependent the $2 billion Californian almond crop – source of 80% of the world’s almonds – is on the pollinator-in-chief. Its annual services to US agriculture alone are worth between US$ 15-20 billion. In 2006 a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder resulted in the desertion of 800,000 hives. It’s happening in other parts of the world as well and scientists cannot pinpoint the cause. Heading an investigation into the disorder, Dr Gordon Wardell of the US Department of Agriculture concludes it is our love-fest with intensive agriculture that has pushed the bees too far “Like people, they thrive on diversity” says Wardell. It’s not just bees. All kinds of pest devourers and seed spreaders like frogs and bats contribute trillions of dollars to the world economy. Our second story features the victimised fruit bat in West Africa. In Ghana it finds refuge from the bush meat hunters in military barracks. And yet the Shea tree, which yields the butter for chocolate and cosmetics, needs the bats to spread its seeds. So what is the value of the fruit bat to Ghana? No one has worked it out, but it’s more that the 60 cents it costs to buy a roasted one in the markets of Accra.
Shrimps vs Mangroves
Imagine that you are a manager for a Pension Fund. Imagine, too, there is an investment opportunity to turn a slice of mangrove swamp into an industrial shrimp farm that will, over ten years, bring in a handsome profit. The swamp brings in nothing. You will invest in shrimps. Meanwhile the country has lost a valuable fish nursery, a barrier against hurricanes and sea level rise and a biodiversity pool. A comparative study in Thailand found that shrimps were worth $5.443 per hectare; meanwhile the true value to society of the mangrove was $35,696 per hectare. Multiplied a million times a day, investing short instead of long is what is at the base of the planetary green asset stripping. Green shoots So should we be welcoming that meteorite or whooping it up until the green doomsday? Perhaps not, not yet at any rate. There are some green shoots out there. Real change, in my view, has to come from public pressure on governments towards sustainability. Most of us may not want new laws or taxes, but we can use our voting power to push for change for long-term common good, of the not-so-painful, politically acceptable variety. Cap and trade; bio-credits; paying directly for ecosystem services; trusts that enable private investment for public good. These are all being tried out. In Costa Rica the government pays farmers to conserve or replant forests rather than use land for cattle and maize, with income from freshwater users such as breweries or HEP dams. It’s an environmental policy that safeguards water supply, biodiversity and tourism. Other countries – Norway and Canada for instance – are making serious attempts to reassess the way they measure national wealth, to include ecosystem services. The report from Nicholas Stern, head of the UK government’s economic service turned a page in the public acceptance of global warming. Now the German government has commissioned a similar report for biodiversity from the chief economist at Deutsch Bank. Yes, there is new green thinking out there. The challenge is to come up with politically-acceptable ways of pricing what we have always reckoned to be priceless. And putting a price on the ‘priceless’ is what is shaping up to make Nature Inc. a controversial part of dev.tv’s core output.
June 03, 2010
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