A quick trivia question as we prepare for World Environment Day on Saturday: How much is the environment worth?
We don’t mean this in a metaphysical way. We’re talking about money. If you were Dr. Evil, and you were going to buy the environment, what would it be worth? (Insert pinky in corner of mouth here.)
Difficult as that question might seem, science is actually tackling it, and researchers have put a dollar value on what enviro-nerds call “ecosystem services” – all the things that nature offers us, from clean air and water to awesome tourism opportunities.
One look at the situation, from 1997, showed up in a recent United Nations report.
The data is a bit old, but it’s some of the most recent on the subject matter. Odds are good that you haven’t seen it before. We at Team Earth hadn’t, either. When we did see it, it blew us away.
The U.N. reports that the value of the world’s ecosystem services is $21 trillion to $72 trillion, each and every year. By way of comparison, the world’s total income in 2008 was $58 trillion.
That’s not all. The U.N. also estimates that restoring lost ecosystems can be 10 times more expensive than maintaining them in the first place.
So you’d need to spend $10 million to restore, say, a wetlands area that would have cost $1 million to maintain – and that offers many, many millions of dollars’ worth of benefits, from protecting against severe weather to filtering water to providing habitat for commercial fish species.
It all gets back to a fundamental truth about the environment. Conservation is about tigers and pandas, sure, but it’s also about conserving us, the nearly 7 billion human beings on the planet.
Like we said at the beginning of this post, Saturday is World Environment Day. In the words of the United Nations Environment Programme, which organizes the event, “WED is about taking action to be part of the solution.”
At UNEP’s website, you can find 30 Easy Ways to Go Green – tips for your everyday life that’ll help you kick-start a routine full of green habits. Take a look. Do something. Because as we’ve seen, fixing the environment once we’ve mucked it up can be expensive, and there’s only so much money to go around.
Photo of wetlands: http://www.flickr.com/photos/intherough/ via a Creative Commons license
