THE VALUE OF NATURE
Professor persuades world powers to examine monetary importance of the environment
Colombia's Gulf of Morrosquillo is home to thousands of mangroves. Their roots arc downward into salty sea water while their limbs climb upward — a mesmerizing entanglement of branches and leaves. But the mangroves must compete with hotels, resorts and other financial ventures in the tourist-dependent area, which spans 523 kilometres of Caribbean coastline. One study found that between 1960 and 2011, the mangrove population in Colombia dropped by more than half, largely due to human activities such as development or trash dumping.
The burgeoning tourist destination of Rincon del Mar, for instance, is one of many towns along the gulf that was built on land cleared of the trees. And because there is no central garbage collection system, people's wrappers, bottles, bags and other refuse often end up in the mangroves that still stand.
In early 2020, the government signed a five-year, US$300 million pact to promote tourism in the gulf area, where approximately 350,000 Colombians live. It called for, among other initiatives, building hotels, a hospital and aqueducts to alleviate a dearth of drinking water that threatens the growth of the tourism sector. But the plan could also put even more pressure on the mangroves, as well as the sea grasses, coral reefs and fisheries offshore.
For Gretchen Daily, threats like these are also moments of opportunity. “Nature is often just seen as kind of in the way of prosperity,” she said. “What we're saying is that nature is crucial to prosperity.”
Daily is a professor of biology at Stanford University and a pioneer in a field known as “natural capital.” The term refers to the soil, air, water and other assets that nature has to offer. As a conservation model, it is rooted in the idea that nature has a measurable value to humans and that protection efforts must go far beyond walled-off reserves and be broadly integrated into development practice and planning.
She has spent more than 30 years developing the scientific underpinnings of natural capital and is the co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, which has grown to include a group of 250 partners around the world. The organization has integrated science into its cornerstone computer program to help governments and other stakeholders prioritize conservation.
By the time Daily and her team had identified the potential for impact in the Gulf of Morrosquillo, the coronavirus pandemic had confined the 56-year-old to her home in Stanford, Calif. Zoom, which decidedly is not her natural habitat, became the norm.
But within a matter of months, the Natural Capital Project put together a report for the Colombian government detailing that more than a third of the coastline had high exposure to flooding and coastal erosion. Protecting and restoring mangroves, the authors said, could help with that issue — especially along two specific stretches of the coast, including Rincon, where local activists say they've removed many tons of trash.
Mangroves, the report highlighted, also nurture robust fisheries for local communities and sequester carbon at a rate two to four times greater than tropical rainforests. Left in their current state, the Morrosquillo mangroves will store 62 million tons of carbon by 2030 — the equivalent of taking 12 million cars off the road for a year — which could help the country toward its commitments under the Paris climate accord.
“Until now, we didn't have the specific information in a simple way to show the importance of maintaining the mangroves,” said Santiago Aparicio, director of environment and sustainable development for the Colombian department of national planning. He added, “you don't protect what you don't value.”
The next step, he said, is to take the information to mayors and local officials to incorporate that value into their development plans. Aparicio said he would like to see them use the Natural Capital Project's work to, for instance, avoid building a bike path through priority mangroves. Another “ideal situation” would be using mangroves instead of cement walls as barriers against rising sea levels fuelled by climate change.
For Daily, the work in Colombia has met all three of the criteria she uses when deciding whether to pursue a project: There must be a policy window that allows change; partners on the ground must be committed to that change; and the change must be scalable.
“I'm always looking for the win-win-win type situations,” said Daily. The Natural Capital Project said it has now worked on some 1,700 projects around the world, and its open-source software has been downloaded in more than 185 countries.
She has been recognized widely for the work, including with the 2020 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. She's also helped mentor the next generation of natural capital researchers and practitioners.
“There are many people who define themselves as ecosystem services scientists now,” said Taylor Ricketts, one of the hundreds of people Daily has taught or advised over the years. “That's what she lit the spark for.”
“Gretchen has really been the forerunner in clarifying the natural capital movement,” said Carl Folke, director of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He said one major catalyst came in late 1997, when Daily edited the book Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems — recently referred to as “one of the most influential books published on the environment in the past 30 years.”
“Gretchen's scholarship has been so revolutionary . ... She changed the whole concept that nature should be protected for itself,” said Alejandra Echeverri, Daily's post-doctoral advisee and the Natural Capital Project's main liaison with the Colombian government. “She came up with this idea that nature should be used for people, in a way that conservation should allow both people and nature to thrive.”
Over the years, Daily has been involved in dozens of natural capital initiatives around the globe. It always starts, she said, from a foundation of basic science.
But to help turn science into tangible outcomes, Daily and the Natural Capital Project combined their research with mapping data to create a software called InVEST, which stands for “Integrated valuation of ecosystem services and trade-offs.” It can help guide policymakers by pinpointing where, and for whom, conservation efforts can have the greatest payoff.
InVEST, Daily said, has enabled them to identify conservation priorities around the globe. But there has been a particularly significant impact in China — a country Daily has spent as much as two months a year in since 2009. In 2016, Daily and her colleagues published a paper in the journal Science showing that nearly half of the land in the country was zoned for protection or restoration; a figure that she said keeps growing.
“China was committing to this whole vision of an ecological society, but they didn't have science to basically calculate the return on investment to protect and restore the most critical natural capital,” Daily said. “We came in with that.”
Some, though, balk at such a capitalist framing of nature. “You are effectively pushing the natural world even further into the system that is eating it alive,” environmental activist George Monbiot said during a 2014 lecture. Four years later, he wrote in The Guardian that, “the natural capital agenda is the definitive expression of our disengagement from the living world.”
And sometimes, natural capital projects backfire. In Mexico, a Bloomberg News investigation found that the country's Sowing Life program, which paid farmers to plant trees, may have actually encouraged people to cut down the jungle so that they could collect government payments for reforesting them.
“There's no way a natural capital approach is going to solve all human problems,” Daily said, noting that there probably always will be cheating. And the work, she said, doesn't preclude the need for deep, systemic reform. But “usually the seeds of revolution are planted many years before the phase that people consider revolutionary.”
In Colombia, officials are eager to participate in another of Daily's efforts: to have nations adopt “gross ecosystem product” — a measure of economic well-being that places nature at the fore. It's a metric that Daily said should be used alongside the more ubiquitous gross domestic product.
“For decades, people have been noting the shortcomings of GDP, but politically it's always been too fraught to remedy,” Daily said. “It's time to deploy something new.”
Gross ecosystem product is, in many ways, a culmination of much of Daily's work. With others, she's lobbied the United Nations to make it an official metric. A climactic meeting on the issue was scheduled for February 2020 at UN headquarters. Then the pandemic hit.
“Missing that trip to New York was really crushing,” said Daily, who along with more than 100 other participants moved their conversations online.
This March, the United
Nations Statistical Commission adopted the standard. “This is a historic step forward toward transforming how we view and value nature,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said.
Daily heard by email, and it brought tears.
“It gave me a feeling of hope.”