Who Decides What Nature Is Worth?
- Ikaya Earth
- Apr 23
- 3 min read
In our world, where everything has a price tag, we're increasingly trying to answer a challenging question: How much is a forest worth? What's the value of clean air? How do we price something as precious as drinkable water? This question sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and environmental sustainability, creating both solutions and new problems.
The Economic Perspective: Markets and Natural Value
From an economic viewpoint, we often try to assign dollar values to natural resources based on what they provide us. Economists talk about two types of prices that help us understand this challenge:
Natural price represents the baseline cost - what it takes to maintain something, including basic profit. For nature, this might include the cost of conservation efforts or restoration.
Market price reflects what people are actually willing to pay. This is where things get complicated with nature - how do we determine what clean air is worth when we can't easily buy or sell it?
When we try to price natural resources, we often focus on their usefulness to humans - timber from forests, drinking water from rivers, or carbon absorption from ecosystems. Companies and governments create markets for "ecosystem services," putting price tags on what nature does for us every day.
The Philosophical Question: Beyond Utility
But here's where philosophy challenges us: Is nature's worth limited to its usefulness to humans? Many philosophers argue that forests, oceans, and wildlife have intrinsic value - worth that exists regardless of human benefit.
This creates a fundamental tension. When we price nature based only on its resources or services, we miss something profound about its inherent worth. A forest isn't just wood and carbon storage - it's a complex living system with value beyond what we can extract from it.
The ancient philosophical tradition reminds us that our journey to understand nature's worth isn't just economic but deeply ethical. How we value nature reflects our values as a society and our relationship with the world around us.
The Necessary Contradiction
Why do we need to put a price on nature? In our economic system, things without price tags often become invisible in decision-making. Assigning value to ecosystem services helps protect them by speaking the language of markets and policy.
Carbon credits, watershed protection payments, and biodiversity offsets create financial incentives to preserve what might otherwise be destroyed for short-term gain. These tools help incorporate environmental costs into business decisions.
The Hidden Dangers
Yet this approach carries serious risks. When we reduce forests to carbon storage or rivers to water supply, we risk:
Undervaluing complex ecosystems whose full benefits we don't understand
Creating markets that prioritize profitable aspects of nature while ignoring others
Suggesting that money can always compensate for environmental damage
Reinforcing the idea that nature exists primarily for human use
The danger lies in believing that pricing nature fully captures its worth. Some values simply cannot be measured in dollars, like the wonder of ancient forests or the right of species to exist.
Finding Balance in a Complex World
The reality is that we need both approaches. Economic valuation helps protect nature within our current systems, while philosophical perspectives remind us of nature's deeper worth beyond market value. Digital tools and sustainable technologies can help us bridge this gap, creating more holistic approaches to environmental valuation.
At Ikaya Earth, we work at this crucial intersection every day. We create high-integrity carbon credits that recognize nature's economic value while honouring its deeper worth through community-centred conservation. Our commitment is transforming landscapes and livelihoods with scalable climate solutions that balance both environmental restoration and sustainable growth.
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