Scientists calculate our debt to the Earth
Wheat crops on the Kansas High Plains in the US depend on aquifer water. Image: James Watkins via Flickr
LONDON, 24 February, 2016 – Perhaps for the first time, scientists have put a direct cash value on the metaphor that conservationists call “natural capital”.
This is, in effect, the money humans don’t have to spend on services that nature supplies for free – such as crop pollination, water purification, and coastal protection by wetlands, sandbanks and reefs.
And one high value transaction supplied gratis by nature is groundwater. For farmers, water in subterranean aquifers represents money in the bank, as groundwater underwrites 40% of world food production.
Eli Fenichel, assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and colleagues looked at withdrawals from the Kansas High Plains Aquifer and report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that between 1996 and 2005, Kansas lost approximately $110 million a year.
Food production
The losses represented the depletion of the aquifer as farmers withdraw this ultimate natural capital to support food production. And the total for the decade was $1.1 billion.
This is roughly equal to Kansas State’s 2005 budget surplus. It is, the scientists say, substantially more than the sums invested in schools over the same period.
It isn’t often that economists can place any direct value on a natural resource. Farming and industry evolved as they did because the natural resources were there in the first place.
Conservationists sometimes pose the question: if plants had not evolved alkaloids that could be exploited as pharmaceutical drugs, or if there were no bees to pollinate fruit blossom, what would humans have to pay to get someone else to do these things?
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