What a crazy end to the week!.. It's been so hectic all week long, and it's not going to end anytime soon [Process Control's midterm next Monday] but at least I am done with all of my Unit Operations Lab presentations today, and there won't be another senior lab presentation for this semester [or ever! Yeay..]

So anyway, being all green and all nowadays.. here's my next article on current environmental issues. Note how I started the first line of the article with the same sentence I used last time.. today I'll be leading a discussion on whether limiting population growth is a key factor in protecting the global environment.. but for now, I'm gonna get something for lunch.. so read on!

SHOULD A PRICE BE PUT ON THE GOODS AND SERVICES PROVIDED BY THE WORLD’S ECOSYSTEM?

The never-ending debate of the ever-growing environmental crises increases the public awareness about the future of the environment. One of the current environmental issues is about pricing nature’s services and goods. Considering that a significant share of the world’s economy resulted from nature’s services, some may argue that attaching an economic price tag to these services and goods may encourage their protection, as well as increasing the publics’ awareness regarding the importance of these service providers. However, on the other hand, others may argue that pricing these services would be an attempt to simulate a market where units of biodiversity can be bought and sold, and would be considered as another source to be exploited. Even though the value of nature’s services is undoubtedly intangible, pricing it would give an estimate of its significance in our ecosystem as the services of nature are often misused due to failure to value them.

Putting a value to the nature’s services would be a way of creating public awareness by estimating the cost which would burden the society if these services had to be replaced. It could also be used as a way of weighing the effects of human activities on nature against the benefits gained from those activities. For example, according to Janet N. Abramovitz if a forest was saved from being transferred into a one-community plantation, it could produce a variety of non-timber forest products while also providing vital watershed protection and climate regulation (page 7). By appreciating the price of nature, human would think twice about destroying these natural resources. “Over the longer term, it was calculated that keeping the forest intact would ensure continued local uses of the area worth $10 million a year (providing 70 percent of local income) and protect fisheries worth $25 million a year - values that would be lost if the forest were cut.”(page 8)

Since the nature’s services contribute enormously in the world’s current economy, pricing these services could encourage its protection. Industrial companies would become more aware of pollution control and using this as an important base in their research and development of new products in the future. Fines and environmental policies are imposed on companies who exceed permitted emissions to control pollution. Nature’s services would no longer be taken for granted as those who interfere with it would be the ones paying for something to replace these services, or at least something to restore it back to its original form.

Though pricing nature’s goods and services are not intended to cheapen nature’s infinite value, it is a way of publicizing that the natural world is an exhaustible resource. Without basic knowledge, humans are more likely to misuse and destroy the ecosystem that provides such valuable services. Human impact on the world is very significant. The cumulative effects of land use and changes have global implications. Abramovitz states that an area can be harsher, drier and warmer once a forest is cleared because the missing plants and soil erosions have disrupted the natural water cycle (page 9). As the climate changes due to human activities, the value of being able to adjust local and global climates would increase.

Through pricing nature’s services and goods, it is also possible to educate and implant environmental ethics in the society. It would teach the public that we should all share the responsibility of caring for the ecosystem in order to maintain and preserve nature’s goods since there are no technological substitutes for most of nature’s services. For example, the cumulative effect of recycling our plastics and glass would save energy and cost as well as our natural reserves so that we would be able to share the conveniences that we have now with the future

Nature’s goods and services are undoubtedly inestimable, just as the value of a human life. There is a real risk of underestimating, or even possibly overestimating, depending on whether the purpose and precise contributions of the species is recognized. Implicitly, economic values are being put on human lives through thousands of governmental regulations. For example, mandatory seat belt laws cost $69 per year of life saved. For any number you pick between $20 foe which a motorcycle helmet can be purchased, and $20 billion for which benzene emission control at rubber-tire manufacturing plants, there is a governmental program from which that number can be inferred as the value of a statistical year of life. For every situation or every regulatory decision, responds to different ethical, economic, political, historical, and other conditions are considered in making decisions. Can we infer that people value their lives at only a few thousand dollars? No, it is simply that people fear and resent some risks less than others, and least of all those risks they control themselves. These moral factors affect private and public decisions about risk.

Pricing nature’s goods and services urges us to recognize the benefits ecosystems provide for free, in the hope that this will prompt us to defend these systems from relentless exploitation and destruction. These values are nothing but estimates which could somehow limit and control the destructions that are constantly being subjected to the Earth’s ecology. The main method of caring for the environment here is to increase awareness and to educate the public to be more responsible and environmentally ethical in our everyday errands.