Our friend Kai in the Globe

Scientists to gauge worth of nature

Team identifying marine zones to study value of environment

DEBORAH JONES

Special to The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- To some people the sight of a meadow, a stretch of river or a stand of leafy trees swaying in the breeze on a hilltop might signify beauty, spirituality or perhaps an opportunity to make money by "improvement" or "development."

Ecologist Kai Chan looks at such things from the dollars-and-cents standpoint of what he calls "ecosystem services" -- the value of the natural environment to humans.

As head of a research team that includes a fisheries economist, an anthropologist and the British Columbia chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Dr. Chan is identifying marine zones off the B.C. coast for in-depth study.

The coast is rife with conflicts between competing demands on resources -- such as those between fishermen harvesting wild fish and fish farmers, or foresters who have an impact on watersheds and recreational users, Dr. Chan says.

He says his research aims to assist decision makers in their plans for resource use.

The Canadian ecosystems project, still in its infancy, is an offshoot of an ambitious global project Dr. Chan has been involved with to develop a new scientific model to measure the value of defined regions of forests, grassland, waterways -- even the air -- to human communities.

He was a lead researcher of a groundbreaking ecosystem study in California, with Stanford University biologist Gretchen Daily. Their report, published last month in the Public Library of Science Biology journal, focused on the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Francisco, and assessed the value of carbon storage, flood control, forage production for livestock, outdoor recreation, pollination of crops such as strawberries and provision of water.

The B.C. project is related, but focuses on marine environments.

Too often, decision makers make plans with little understanding of hidden or future environmental issues that can cause economic loss or even death, says Dr. Chan, a Toronto native who recently moved from Stanford to take up a post at the University of British Columbia.

Devastation caused by hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was worsened by the lack of natural buffers on the coastline, which shows a failure to assess the value of nature's "services," he says.

When Katrina smashed into New Orleans, the wetlands that could have buffered its force were diminished because they'd been used for development. More than 1,800 people died and the damage to the U.S. economy was estimated at $150-billion, he says.

In East Asia, mangrove forests were wiped out to build shrimp farms. If the mangroves had been considered valuable to humans, he said, the shore would have had more protection when the tsunami hit, killing about 230,000 people.

If decision makers had been able to place a real value on mangroves and wetlands, the economic appeal of using them for shrimp farms and land development could have been assessed, and the ecosystems would have been protected, he says.

The B.C. ecosystem research is part of a growing trend among scientists and economists to measure the natural world in economic terms.

Other examples are the British report by Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, that estimated global climate change will cost as much as $7-trillion and turn 200 million people into environmental refugees.

Another is New York City's purchase throughout the 1990s of land in the watershed that provides its drinking water.

Protecting the natural watershed let New York protect its water quality and avoid the heavy cost of building a water-treatment plant, says Taylor Ricketts, a landscape ecologist with the Washington office of the World Wildlife Fund, who is involved with Dr. Chan on the Natural Capital Project.

Dr. Ricketts worked on another research project to measure the value of tropical forests in pollination "services" in Costa Rica. Researchers found that where coffee farms were near untouched tropical forests, greater pollination by wild bees produced a 20-per-cent greater yield of coffee. The forest was subsidizing farmers, for free.

"It added up to $60,000 a year in added revenue for one farm," Dr. Ricketts said.

"People are beginning to realize and understand there are real economic benefits we get from healthy ecosystems, worth significant amounts of money," he said.

"That's a great thing, I think, because it makes people aware of the ways in which we depend on ecosystems and makes conservation more mainstream than special-interest."

The economic arguments are increasingly being made, added Dr. Ricketts, because "we are newly able to do it. We have better understanding of the ecological things that ecosystems do for us and we have a better understanding of how to value them economically. We're newly able because of a bunch of research to place dollar value on ecosystem services, by ecologists and economists. . . . People are beginning to believe the numbers, and you are beginning to hear about it outside of science journals."