Coastal cities around the world are being squeezed by two opposing forces: urban sprawl and rising seas. This struggle is intensely visible in the lowlands of South Florida, where developing neighborhoods routinely flood and saltwater flooding damages estuaries that protect communities from the worst of our climate crisis.
Enormous resources are poured into environmental restoration projects there, and development is subject to multiple layers of approval. Yet in 2022, Miami-Dade County commissioners voted to expand the legal boundary, which includes sprawl, to allow the 400-acre warehouse project. They fail to see the value of this land in the wider ecosystem: pave it and you cut off waterways that maintain a critical buffer against flooding and erosion.
Wetlands, coastal plains, sand dunes, forests, and many other permeable surfaces do cheaply (or even for free) what man-made dams, levees, and pumps cost billions of dollars. It protects the land around it from storm surges, flooding rains, erosion and pollution. They are the vital infrastructure that makes us more resilient to climate change, and the costs of destroying them or weakening their ability to function must be factored into decisions to build and grow.
To this end, the economic incentives to develop any natural landscape should be weighed against the conservation economic value that the land already provides. Economists call this the “damage avoided” valuation. Local planning commissions could weigh the value of a sand dune, oyster reef, or marsh in flood protection against the cost of replacing them with a seawall and water pump system.
How do these “ecosystem services” compare to the costs of, say, 30 years of emergency operations, utility outages, and repeated rebuilds? Maintaining and restoring natural infrastructure to support healthy functioning saves money, time and lives.
The concept of “natural capital,” or the idea that ecosystem services should be valued in a similar way to any form of wealth, dates back to the 1970s. For example, markets have always valued wood as a commodity, but not the services that went with its production, such as soil maintenance, carbon storage, erosion control, and nutrient cycling. We didn’t need a market for the resources that industrialists thought were abundant and infinitely renewable.
This exploitative assumption turned out to be very wrong. Failure to measure the benefits of ecosystem services in policy and management decisions is the main reason many of these ecosystems have disappeared. In one of many recent corrections to earlier misunderstandings about the value of nature, a 2021 World Bank report said natural capital should redefine wealth.
Flooding during rare floods much greater economic value in 2050
Due to climate change, the underestimation of ecosystem services is more dangerous. Wetlands that mitigate community flooding during rare floods will have much greater economic value in 2050, when damaging storms occur more frequently. The value of a preserved forest is immeasurable when it prevents the emergence of new pathogens and their spread into a pandemic.
Obviously, the monetary value of nature is difficult to estimate and has practical limits. It is also highly site-specific, with conservation value depending on the surrounding density of people, industries and infrastructure. It would be difficult to create a template that would help all types of municipalities crunch the math of natural wealth.
It also seems silly to put a dollar amount on ecosystems we’d rather think of as priceless, existing on their own, and valuable to people in ways that transcend capitalism. This rarity is ethically correct. But developers have long associated worthlessness with worthlessness, which allows them to profit without having to pay for the consequences of environmental destruction.
It is impossible to avoid the difficult trade-offs between development and conservation for example, we cannot ignore the affordable housing crisis in the US. But the case for preserving nature as infrastructure is consistent with what many urban planners are calling for as a solution: moving away from limiting single-family zoning and allowing for multi-family and mixed-use development and communal spaces that reduce dependence on cars. Basically less stretching.
Economic value is never the only reason why nature is worth protecting; it’s simply a powerful, little-used tool to help us make decisions about how to live more sustainably in a climate-changing world. If policy makers thought about natural infrastructure in the language of economics, they might recognize how deeply we rely on it.
Written by: Vaishali verma
Reference : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/use-nature-as-infrastructure/
