Biden administration moves forward with measuring nature’s economic impact
Biden administration moves forward with measuring nature’s economic impact
The Biden administration’s 15-year agenda to make nature a measurable part of the country’s economy is moving forward.
At a recent ocean biodiversity summit, federal officials touted the plan to quantify the country’s natural assets and the services provided by healthy ecosystems, like tree canopies that can cool urban areas or kelp forests that prevent coastline erosion.
At the end of the process, the administration says researchers and policymakers will have access to data and statistics that help them take those natural services into account.
Our traditional measures of economic activity are great at capturing market transactions, per Richard Ready, an environmental economist with Montana State University.
“If I get in my car and drive down to Utah and go mountain biking,” then parts of that trip will be reflected in economic data, he said. “If I spend some money on lodging, that gets counted.”
It gets counted in quarterly GDP and consumer spending data and all kinds of other metrics you hear about on this show.
“If I go to a restaurant, that gets counted, but the enjoyment that I get from being out on the desert” — and the fact that all that spending was because of the beautiful desert — “doesn’t get counted as part of the GDP,” Ready said.
“But that doesn’t mean that it’s not there and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor of Sustainability Sciences at the University of Iowa.
Aside from generating economic activity, she said healthy ecosystems can also do important work, like a forest that stores carbon or a wetland that purifies water.
“By omitting these values from the economy, we are giving a false sense of growth and progress,” she said.
In other words, strong GDP growth doesn’t necessarily account for the environmental costs of that growth.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said Nat Keohane, who heads up the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
The Biden administration’s plan could help federal agencies make better decisions about regulating industry and protecting public lands, he said.
“We can put an economic value on clean drinking water, both in terms of how people value that, what they’d be willing to pay,” he said.
But there’s also value in terms of the avoided costs — things you don’t have to do if you just keep the water clean in the first place. “Installing municipal clean water systems, right, that have to filter it,” Keohane pointed out.
And if we don’t put a dollar value on ecosystem services, he added that their effective worth is zero.
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