Today’s guest post is from Steve Zwick, who edits Ecosystem Marketplace, an online news service that reports on market-based solutions to environmental problems. Based on the premise that the cost of production should include the cost of environmental degradation, EM is published by non-governmental organization Forest Trends and funded by a diverse array of NGOs, governmental agencies, and private companies.
A native of Chicago, Steve began contributing to EM in 2006, after more than a decade writing about sustainable business for publications such as Time and Fortune. He also produces radio features for Germany’s Deutsche Welle Radio and National Public Radio in the United States. Steve’s background combines journalism, business and the environment—he studied journalism at Northwestern, worked as a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade, became a futures trader and then got involved in local environmental campaigns, which led to his writing career. Steve sent me this thoughtful post from Hanoi, where he was watching Ivory Coast play Brazil in the World Cup and preparing for the 17th Katoomba meeting this week, as he’ll explain:
BP’s Deepwater Horizon debacle reminds us once again that our economy depends on our ecology and that one man’s cheap solution is often another’s cost. It’s as true in the United States as it is here in Vietnam, where subsistence farmers often must choose between feeding their families and preserving nature.
But the apparent conflict between commerce and nature is a false one, because in the long run everything we buy, sell, eat, and produce is derived from nature. If we destroy nature, we destroy our own livelihoods.
Mangroves, for example, provide shelter for vulnerable fish and breeding ground for shrimp. They also shield the coast from slow erosion and sudden storms; they extract impurities from water and pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, depositing it in the ocean floor – thus helping to reduce the greenhouse effect and slow climate change.
All of these are ecosystem services, delivered to us by nature, free of charge. And because they’re free of charge, they are taken for granted – and destroyed to make things we can put a price on.
Over the last four decades, however, we’ve seen scores of efforts to measure the economic value of services provided by wetlands, forests, and other living ecosystems – as well as habitat supporting endangered species – and then attempts to entice those who either benefit from these services or contribute to their destruction to instead pay for their upkeep.
That’s what payments for ecosystem services (PES) are all about. Some of the more exciting emerging PES schemes involve water. Indeed, water quality trading (WQT) schemes are proliferating in streams, rivers, and lakes across the world. WQT is a pillar of the Obama administration’s new scheme to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. [click to continue…]
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