'Valuing' nature won't save us
On nature, money, value and worthiness
Ten years ago, while at a science fair, I was confronted with whether carbon credits and valuing ecosystem services could actually work for nature. I was representing Forest Research and explaining the value of ecosystem services to a guy who worked in tech. I gave the example of the New York watershed: water quality was a problem and building an artificial filtration plant would cost $6-8 billion and cost $200-400 million a year to operate. Alternatively, if they invested $200 million a year in supporting a healthy ecosystem in the watershed, nature would do the job for them.
I told the tech guy this story; it was my go-to story that I was sure would convince anyone of the value of nature. His response was this: ‘But if you could make $500 million a year by turning the watershed into a business park, you could easily pay to clean the water, plus you’d have more money and business.’. I was shocked. I made the point that there will be other benefits beyond water that haven’t yet been quantified. His response was the same - if you could make more money from a business park, even after you’ve quantified every aspect of nature, it would be worth it.
Last week, pretty much exactly 10 years later, I was at the Concave summit at London Climate Action Week when a similar question came up from those working in the NBS world: ‘Are we just going to monetise every aspect of nature?’.
Visionary people made carbon credits happen for the right reasons. Carbon credits channel money to nature that wouldn’t have got there before, but what direction is it taking us in? The question asked at Concave gave me hope that the same visionary people, people who can get things done, are looking ahead at the direction of travel and thinking about how to steer the momentum away from monetising every aspect of nature and towards a new model of valuing.
I’m hopeful because of the people who work in this space, but I’m worried because carbon credits, while a seriously impressive innovation, bring nature to meet conventional economics. I hope we can bring economics to meet nature, but there’s a deep-seated fear that this can never happen, which is captured by a quote from the book Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher “Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow and prosper.”
If we could quantify every aspect of nature I'm sure protecting nature would come out on top in many cases. Perhaps it's more of a philosophical issue, imagine if all the non-economic value of you was quantified - your value as a friend, a sibling, a member of the community. Something doesn't sit right about it. Perhaps because quantifying it would require an assessment of your value by someone else, it would be framed as an objective quantification, even though it is a subjective value. I guess that leads me to the question of who gets to decide how much a tree is worth.
Perhaps the problem with quantifying the value of nature lies in subjectivity framed as objectivity and underlying power dynamics of who gets to decide what something is worth and therefore who gets to decide whether something is worthy.