How Canada Is Endangering Its Natural Wealth
Impaired ecosystems leave Canada at an economic disadvantage. A Tyee Solutions excerpt.
It’s an old economic truism that scarcity creates value. In an era when natural capital is disappearing around the globe, it’s also increasingly highly valued. Beyond degrading biological, intrinsic and cultural values, Canada’s ineffective stewardshipof our ecosystems puts at risk billions, potentially trillions of dollars worth of wealth.
As long ago as 1996, Simon Fraser University economist Nancy Olewiler estimated that British Columbia received $2.75 billiona year (adjusted for inflation to 2014) in non-lumber value from its pre-pine-beetled forests, mainly from outdoor recreation, but also from wildlife viewing and recreational fishing and hunting.
More recently, economists have estimated that the ecological services provided by the Mackenzie River watershed in northern Canada are worth some $571 billion a year —thirteen and a half times the region’s official GDP of $42 billion. In 2014 an unknown portion of that wealth went up in smoke when fires consumed vast swaths of boreal forest in the Northwest Territories.
Canadians feared for their natural security, as long ago as 1989 when eight in ten of us agreed at least somewhat in surveys that pollution “threatens the survival of the human race.” The extent of that threat is now much clearer. So is how much we stand to lose.
Wherever economists look, they find that nature’s contribution to Canada’s wealth exceeds what appears in conventional accounts. The value of climate-threatening carbon stored in Manitoba’s 50 million hectares of boreal forest, for example, was assessed last year at $117 billion — 10 times the province’s full budget — not counting recreation, hunting, and other economic contributions.
Toronto’s trees were revealed in a different study to be worth more than $80 million annually, in services that run from energy-saving shade to scrubbing pollutants from the air; that amount was more than the city spent in 2014 on economic development and recreation. The asset value of the urban forest was assessed at $7 billion.
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