There is a growing movement to assess the value–in dollar terms–of “ecosystem services” such as storm protection (from salt marshes), pollination of crops (from bee colonies and insects), natural predation of harmful insects and parasites (by birds, bats and other animals), fertilizer from animal feces, fish in the oceans, clean water and air, and cooling/greenhouse gas-controlling forests, etc.
This movement has been gaining steam–especially with the recent loss of 40% of U.S. bee colonies by a mysterious virus (causing billions of dollars in lost crops), and the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina (largely due to the human destruction of natural buffers like salt marshes and sand bars).
Earlier this year, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Peter Kareiva et al, published a call for renewed efforts to put a dollar figure on the value of nature’s services. Putting a price on such services (defined as any function of the natural world that we benefit from) is extremely tricky and difficult, but not putting any price at all on these services, in the view of the authors, seems a serious mistake.
Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, elaborated on this idea: “In this world, cost benefit analysis and dollars are how decisions get made…When nature and the benefits that nature [provides] are not converted to dollars then it can’t be on the table for those discussions and, in a way, nature’s not getting credit for what it’s doing.” (quoted from a February, 5, 2009 podcast report by David Biello for Scientific American)
The time has come to credit Nature for what it does for us. Not to do so, the authors argue, is to devalue Nature, and thus to encourage our collective ignorance and misuse/abuse of its services.
photo credit: Jon Sullivan, public domain
About Michael Ricciardi
You can also listen to a longer podcast with Peter Kareiva about ecosystem services in the Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment podcast series, Beyond the Frontier: http://www.esa.org/podcast/?cat=4
Ecosystem services should be recognized and monetized as much as possible; however, one in this list is more of a problem than a service. In the process of storing animal manures for use as fertilizers, and particularly in the process of composting them, enough methane is generated to make the carbon footprint of these fertilizers far higher than that for “synthetic” nitrogen. See
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17356325/Carbon-Footprint-of-Organic-Fertilizer
The best thing to do with manure is to put it through an anaerobic digester to make methane and then use that as a clean, carbon-neutral fuel. Alternatively it can be put through fast pyrolysis to make clean energy and biochar. The energy from either alternative could be used to run the Haber-Bosch process and make low footprint nitrogen fertilizer