There’s a lot of fluffy stuff written about nature, like it’s good for our wellbeing to have it around or spend time within it. But when the bean counters say to show them the money in terms of its benefits, data has been hard to find.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has now brought new evidence to the natural capital valuation discussion with the release of the first attempt at National Ecosystem Accounts. The accounts align to the international System of Environmental and Economic Accounts.
A fast fact from the data that is very relevant post-Cyclone Alfred is the finding that mangrove ecosystems have a demonstrable financial benefit for society, especially property owners and the insurance industry.
Mangroves, along with coral reefs, dunes and sandbanks, act as a buffer against tidal and storm surges.
“We estimate that mangroves protected 4006 dwellings and 7653 people around Australian coastlines. These mangroves prevented more than an estimated $57 million worth of damages to these dwellings,” Jonathon Khoo, ABS head of environment statistics, said.
“We also measured the size of these ecosystems. In 2021, mangroves covered an estimated 1.1 million hectares of Australia’s coastal areas. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were home to 97 per cent of mangroves in Australia.”
The not-so-great news is that the spatial extent of these “awesome” property defenders in the form of open mangrove forest and mangrove woodlands has decreased, according to the data.
Water as life, water as risk
Another interesting finding is that while the use of surface water for human consumption in the form of drinking water has decreased by 2.3 per cent since 2015 to 16 despite population growth, the use of water as a material input for activities such as manufacturing, mining and agriculture has increased.
The accounts show water as a material consumed 86 per cent of all surface water extracted from rivers and streams for human use – and the value of that water has gone down, in other words, it’s costing less for industries and sectors to use more of this precious resource.
Land use intensity is another element of the data relevant to the property sector. For example, intensive uses such as urban development and industry in land adjacent to non-perennial streams increased by 8.2 per cent since 2015 to 16, and intense uses adjacent to perennial rivers increased by 1.7 per cent.
(What this means is there are potentially more people and businesses moving into land areas that are more exposed to flash flooding or riverine flooding events.)
We’re building on the food chain
Urban development is also encroaching on productive farmland. The ABS found that between 2015 and 2016, urban and industrial ecosystems (as in land uses) increased by 281,000 hectares – a 5.1 per cent increase. The majority was converted from farmland, including 191,000 ha of sown pastures and fields and 65,000 ha of annual croplands.
One of the other vital ecosystem services is climate regulation, and the ABS has crunched the numbers.
Khoo said that over 34.5 million kilo tonnes of carbon was stored by ecosystems, with a combined monetary value of $43.2 billion.
“The ecosystem which contributed the most to carbon storage was grasslands, with $18.1 billion. This was followed by native forests, which contributed $17.8 billion, and savannas, which contributed $7.1 billion.”
- Read all the full ABS report and explore the data here.
One can only applaud and support the thrust of this article. And yet, it is still incomplete. Quote: “…. when the bean counters say to show them the money in terms of its benefits, data has been hard to find.” This sentence and the article betray three misconceptions about ‘nature’ and its worth.
First, it doesn’t help understand that planetary habitability – for any species, including ours – is utterly inconceivable without healthy natural ecosystems: its economic value is therefore by definition infinite. And if this is infinite then any fractions, segments or units thereof also are infinite.
Second it implicitly perpetuates dominant myths surrounding the divisions between climate and biodiversity: these downplay the climate creation and stabilization outcomes that result from functionally intact, pervasive biodiversity. A stable climate isn’t just a CO2-e emissions function.
And third, and even if the opposite is intended: monetary valuations and financial trading frames inherently devalue nature and invite public and policy shoulder-shrugging (‘so what, we just print more money’) and/or to corporate appropriation, fee-generating monetisation, privatisation and local community disenfranchisement while simulating an imaginary and illusory balancing act towards fundamentally flawed ‘climate neutrality’ aims and targets.
The genre of ‘what’s nature worth’ and the long tradition of natural goods-and-services accounting was well-meaning but also has been a continuation of the one-sided exploitation interests that underlie the ‘Earth for all’ thinking also colouring the SDGs. Now we understand the precarious and thin end of an evolutionary limb this has led us onto.
The existential challenge today is to invert this very thinking, realising that all of human endeavour has to be devoted to regenerating the habitability of this biosphere: All for Earth.
It is framed in this brief open-access summary: https://all4earth.life .