How much is nature worth?

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are economic compensations provided to landowners in exchange of managing their land in a way that provides a good or service related to ecology. Those services can include reforestation, afforestation or water sources protection, just to mention a few. Under a PES, for instance, a farmer may receive a payment to turn his or her grassland into a continuation of neighboring forest.

In principle, implementing a PES policy might seem to be an easy call. After all, who can argue against the expansion of a forest, the restoration of an affected estuary or the protection of a water spring? However, in practice, proposing and implementing a PES can be highly controversial. One of the many dilemmas involved lies in a short yet profound question: how much is nature worth?

While some schools of economic thinking have tried to answer this question through environmental economics tools, other schools have criticized those attempts. The latter have argued that conventional economic tools cannot be used to value nature because nature’s value is incommensurable. Moreover, they argue that environmental economics, more often than not, will fail to address issues such as distributive justice.

The discussion on how to answer the question – and whether the question should be answered at all - has transcended academic spheres and has been raised in citizen arenas. For instance, in 2012, George Monbiot, a well-known journalist, argued that pricing rivers and the rain would diminish nature and us all. Likewise, grassroots movements have pointed out that PES are not always implemented as their design intended, and result in environmental and distributive injustices.

Environmental economics schools and opponents of PES, nevertheless, can be seen as two sides of the same coin. If we think in the broader global context, their common ground might be bigger than their differences. They both explain that nature is worth much more than we often acknowledge. Their apparently opposing views agree that a forest is worth much more than the market price of wood, and a grassland has much more value than the price of the minerals within its soil. And while the two sides of this coin discuss whether human kind should answer the question, natural areas and those who depend on them around the world continue to be sold off on the cheap.

Luckily, many citizens, institutions and other actors have not only engaged in discussions but have also found the time to design solutions. For example, some areas in Latin America already have PES programs in place; the same goes for countries in Asia and Africa. On the other side, grassroots movements have also made their efforts and produced successes of their own. Nevertheless, none of those solutions should be seen as a panacea as ethical questions do remain regarding their acceptability and implementation. In that sense, we should never stop discussing, as their discussions can nourish hybrid pathways towards sustainability.

Finally, most people would probably feel confused, speechless or even outraged if they were asked to price the last 60 Armur leopards or the last 300 Cross River gorillas. However, in a world where many understand the language of money, refusing to discuss the worth of nature in monetary terms might go at the risk of forgetting that nature is worth more than we often acknowledge. Thus, whether our personal view is that nature’s value is incommensurable or that it can be assessed with economic tools, PES can guide collective reflections about its value. Furthermore, they can help to reach agreements on policy measures that are at least acceptable for all the actors involved, including nature herself.