I feel sorry for environmental economics.
As a discipline it is too often viewed as ‘quasi-economics’ by more orthodox
practitioners and is often treated with extreme suspicion by environmentalists. Despite this, the subject has managed to
flourish within state bureaucracies and today’s conservation rhetoric is guided
by the concept of ‘ecosystem services’, which smacks of the influence of
economists. I was therefore surprised to read this short piece by environmental economist Zara Phang
who reports that reference to the subject was almost completely absent during
the launch of the Malaysian chapter of the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Zara’s piece also effectively makes the
point that there needs to be a change in the way ‘sustainability’ is perceived.
For environmentally beneficial initiatives to gain traction within governments
across the world, it is vital that the economic benefits of sustainable
initiatives – namely in the form of avoided future costs – are properly
recognised so that ‘sustainability’ ceases to be viewed solely as an economic
burden. An example of this is the work of TEEB that looks at valuing the
benefits of biodiversity:
Through developing ways of valuing the
economic benefits of the environment, environmental economists are making
contributions to the pro-sustainability debate the importance of which, I
believe, should be better recognised.
Would be interesting to go into the different methods of valuing the benefits from environment. Humanity..by that I mean the decision makers like most political parties around the word, tends to be short sighted and I am skeptical that even if there is an efficient way of valuing environment these policy makers & politician wont take a green stand.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point. Evaluating the various methods that exist value the environment is a pretty massive area of environmental econ but I might try and write something on it later... I share your skepticism about whether valuation makes a difference, but I reckon a pretty effective comeback is that some numbers are better than no numbers: if politicians continue to ignore empirical evidence about the benefits provided by the environment I think it's up to civil society to demand that they start acting. My funk post above also addresses this.
DeleteInteresting post. I had the opportunity to chat with the people from TEEB recently. As I understand, a part of their work is to promote natural capital management (some info in link below) for adoption by companies. If successful, this could lead to a shift towards business taking a more serious stance on environmental valuation as part of their business model. Nonetheless, the valuation and paper work could be resource intensive and expensive to implement. Would you have any thoughts on this?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.teebforbusiness.org/how/organizational-change-for-natural-capital-management-strategy-and-implementation.html
Thanks Joon, I wasn't aware of that particular aspect of TEEB. The UK also has an independent committee established to inform and advise government about the state of the UK's natural capital: http://www.defra.gov.uk/naturalcapitalcommittee/ who are working with companies to try and develop a corporate natural capital accounting framework. Hopefully recognition of the value of natural capital, both by corporations and government, will encourage better protection of our natural assets!
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