UN quantifies the environment’s value, but will that stop the paving?

By speaking the language of capital to capitalists, the United Nations hopes to prove that damaging the environment costs them more than it profits them. But if you ask me, men of property will still opt for the profit.
This weekend, the UN released a study on the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, which touts the economic benefits of environmental preservation and remediation–no surprise there–but it also arms policy makers to protect the environment from development by assigning economic values to “environmental services.” That’s where the climb gets interesting–and steep:
For example, the study finds that forests in Sri Lanka provide pollination services to agriculture that are roughly equal in economic value to the cattle and sugar-cane operations for which the forests are usually cleared. Each activity generates about $400 per hectare per year. But pollination is only one of the economic services provided by the forest. It also provides local humans with forest agriculture, fishing, firewood, flood attenuation, water treatment, and carbon sequestration.
Add those up, and farmers who clear the Sri Lankan forest for a profit of about $400 per hectare per year cost themselves and the rest of us about $3,000 per hectare per year in lost environmental services, the study concludes.
Coral reefs, according to the study, provide about $1.27 million in environmental services per hectare, including tourism, natural hazard management, and fisheries. As coral reefs vanish because of climate change, ocean acidification, sedimentation, and development, the UN hopes humans will see the loss of those services as real economic costs.
The report urges governments to factor such costs into development decisions:
A study in southern Thailand on conversion of mangroves into commercial shrimp farms showed net private economic returns estimated at $1,220 per hectare per year, taking account of available subsidies…. The conversion decision is clearly an easy one for those making the private gain, but the conclusion changes if the main costs and benefits to society are included.
Estimated benefits provided by mangroves, mostly to local communities, were around $584/hectare for collected wood and non-wood forest products, $987/hectare for providing nursery for off-shore fisheries and $10,821/hectare for coastal protection against storms, totalling $12,392/hectare (even without considering other services like carbon sequestration) – an order of magnitude larger than the benefits of converting the mangroves to shrimp farming.
But against all that public good, I believe the conversion decision will remain an easy one for those making the private gain.
“Humankind still has a lot to learn about the nature of value,” says the UN, “and the value of nature.”
True enough, but it’s the nature of value itself that prevents ongoing, pre-existing, long-term benefits like environmental services from seeming as real to capitalists as the profits they gain in market transactions and deposit into their bank accounts. The UN report conflates these two kinds of value, treating them as one, in a way that capitalists never will.
No matter how real the environment’s value may be, it becomes real for capitalists only when it enters a market in exchange, when it becomes a positive number in someone’s account. That’s why it has been easier for people who own parcels of forest to earn a living by turning trees into logs than by cultivating them as carbon sponges.
Governments may be able to convert some value by attaching regulations and fees to environmental services–that’s how cap and trade can generate income for people who cultivate trees as carbon sponges–but it’s unlikely governments could ever do so on the scale the UN report justifies.
What happens to the Sri Lankan cattle farmer if he has to pay $3,000 per hectare per year in fees for lost environmental services in order to make his $400 per hectare annual income?
Governments in capitalist societies exist to support capitalism, not to halt its march. Most effect change only when capitalism itself is threatened, and only enough to remove the threat. They don’t have the power to alter its structure.
Newsweek published a story on the UN study under the title, How much is a tree worth? But because they conflate these two different kinds of value, neither Newsweek nor the UN study can quite answer that question.
The UN report is designed to empower governments to save whole forests and reefs, and certainly it will fortify those arguments, but the forces at play–value, private property, private gain–are the same forces present in the most ordinary decisions, on the smallest scale, where it’s easiest to see what a single tree is really “worth”.
A few years ago I lived in a flat in a three-story graystone with a small back yard where a single ash tree stood. As tall as the graystone, it was the only tree of significance in an entire city block of concrete, asphalt, brick and mortar.
I marveled at the way the ash leafed out in spring, shading our apartments during Chicago’s hot summers, and then dropped its leaves in fall, letting the sun reach our apartments during Chicago’s cold winters. Cleverly designed environmental services.
The ash hosted an ecosystem all its own–cardinals, woodpeckers, nuthatches, mourning doves, sparrows, blackbirds, the occasional escaped parrot, myriad insects, two species of squirrels, mosaics of lichens.
Then along came a new landlord and chopped it down. I was so simultaneously sickened, saddened, and enraged that all I could do was move away. But when I tried to convey these sentiments to friends who had not gazed at the greenery of the ash or lazed in its shade, I found myself unable to adequately express what was lost. My outrage found little purchase in their practical American hearts.
“Well,” said one friend, “it was his tree to cut down.”
In Ireland farmers will leave a circle of untilled earth around a white-thorn bush even in the middle of a plowed field. The white thorn is believed to stand at the entrance to the other world. In our relentlessly paved Chicago neighborhood, that ash tree was an entrance to the natural world.
Irish farmers will leave the sunny tops of hills to any ancient cairns or neolithic forts that remain there from the ancients, for they know such properties can never really belong to any creature who walks the earth for a single lifetime.
After the landlord cut down the tree, I counted its rings. It was the same age as he. It had been a seed when he was an embryo. Certainly that ash tree gave more than it took until he took its life. But what it gave, even if quantified, could not be deposited in his accounts.
“Well,” said a neighbor who did not share my outrage, “he wants to build a garage.”
A garage. With the tree gone, the landlord gazed across a newly barren postage stamp of weedy land littered with blown trash and found himself in possession of a good site for a garage. A little house for his car to live in. So that it might be protected from the climate extremes that its exhausts are causing to worsen.
I saw the death of the tree as the death of a being who had participated in that patch of earth longer than any of us. But others seemed inured to the tragedy by a few simple principles of economics: private property, value, private gain.
Would it have saved the tree if I had waved a study in the landlord’s face arguing that the tree’s contribution to the climate was greater than the climate’s threat to the landlord’s car? Not a chance. It was his tree to cut down, and he wants a garage.
How much would he have had to receive in payments for the tree’s environmental services before he began to appreciate it more than his delicate car? And who would pay him?
Since the tree vanished, a neighboring yard once wild with weeds and shrubs has disappeared under a smooth coat of black asphalt, a fresh parking lot. Inch by inch the world vanishes, like a ripe peach in the furry grip of a ravenous fungus that cares not a whit about the long-term consequences of its hunger, much less about the price of peaches.