The failure of ecosystem services: Why putting a price tag on nature hasn’t worked

Richard Branson, Jane Goodall and Edward Norton might seem like strange bedfellows. But in 2012, at the Earth Summit in Brazil, they stood together on stage making the case that putting a price tag on nature was the only sensible way to prevent its destruction. Goodall, who spent decades studying chimps in Tanzania, took the microphone and wavered a bit: “It’s a bit shocking to me that we have to do that. I know why we have to do that. It makes perfectly good sense… But we mustn’t forget, for the sake of our children and great-grandchildren, to keep alive that reverence for the natural world.”

Her words held an ambivalence that many biologists felt towards the idea of recasting coral reefs, tundra and tropical forests in terms of dollar bills, says environmental scientist and anthropologist Daniel Suarez at Middlebury College in Vermont. But they hoped that by speaking the same language as financial markets and the boardroom executives who live by them, they could help plummeting wildlife populations to flourish.

Needless to say, that largely hasn’t happened, leading many of the biologists who rallied around this concept of “ecosystem services” to ask: what now? In his new book, Biologists Unite, Suarez traces the meteoric rise and fall of this pragmatic but ultimately doomed approach to conservation. New Scientist spoke with Suarez about why so much hope was pinned on framing nature in terms of monetary value, how it was never fully embraced by governments and businesses, and how biologists are now trying to save what’s left of the planet’s biodiversity by grappling with the root causes of environmental destruction.

Thomas Lewton: What are ecosystem services?

Daniel Suarez:

Ecosystem services can be simply defined as the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Take the forests where I grew up, on the west coast of Canada, where the idea was brought into debates over whether to cut forests down and use them for timber and logging or to conserve them and leave them standing.

The lens of ecosystem services lets you consider the wider range of benefits these forests are providing: people are going in there and harvesting mushrooms and other non-timber forest products, these ecosystems are filtering water, the land is sequestering carbon and people are using forests for lots of recreational activities, too – in other words, their only value isn’t just producing two-by-fours. So, a basic rationale for embracing this framework was how it could tip the cost-benefit scales of these sorts of decisions, perhaps toward conservation. When you can quantify the value of all these different ecosystem services, you might find that they far exceed the benefits of cutting that forest down.

And when you add them all up at a global scale, you can end up with some pretty impressive numbers. In 1997, a team of researchers infamously tried to calculate the total monetary value of the world’s ecosystems using this approach. They came up with $33 trillion, a colossal figure, roughly double gross global economic output at the time. It was a controversial but attention-grabbing finding that put ecosystem services on the map.

When did the concept of ecosystem services become popular among conservationists and biologists?

The idea that societies depend on the living processes around them is an ancient one. But the term “ecosystem services” really burst onto the scene in the late 90s. Intensive efforts started being put into the science of systematically measuring different services, and then trying to put that knowledge into the hands of decision-makers. The production of scientific papers on ecosystem services exploded. And these ideas began to get disseminated across lots of different contexts, from national governments and big conservation groups to major corporations and international environmental agreements.

Biologists around the world really did unite behind the idea, at least for a while. It was everywhere. You would go to summits and conferences and you’d hear monarchs, heads of state, Fortune 500 business leaders, big-name celebrities, all talking about ecosystem services – this nerdy and arcane topic. Key players in global biodiversity politics were coalescing around the notion and presenting it as the way forward for conservation. I remember this one scientist who once jokingly tried to convince me that ecosystem services were now more popular than Michael Jackson – at least, when you compare numbers of citations in books.

Why was this seen as the only course of action?

In the absence of these kinds of estimates, so the reasoning went, decision-makers were simply going to continue giving nature a default economic value of zero. With a more complete understanding of what was at stake, the people in power would respond by doing the right thing – which was also the smart and sustainable thing.

One revealing moment I discuss in my book was at the 2016 World Conservation Congress. Inger Anderson, then the director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, declared that what conservationists most urgently needed to do at this moment was learn how to “better resonate in the halls of power”. Her argument reflected a pervasive view about how to properly address these disastrous worldwide declines in biodiversity: by appealing to powerful decision-makers and helping them make better-informed, more rational choices.

There’s some critical context to this story. The rise of ecosystem services took shape in parallel with the much broader rise of neoliberalism – the ideology of “letting the market decide” an array of important questions in society, including those related to environmental policy and management. Deeply troubled and justifiably alarmed by the destruction of nature they were witnessing, biologists agreed to play along and reframe their work in terms they hoped might appeal to the powerful interests who followed this way of thinking.

Was there any unease among conservationists about treating nature in these terms?

I was struck, after spending so much time with ecosystem service scientists, by how many of them harboured serious doubts toward the concept. These hesitations grew more pronounced as I followed this story over the years, but from the outset, there was already some discomfort with what it meant to reduce the living world to such human-centred and monetary terms. What does it mean to put a dollar value on tigers, or onto any other living being?

Biologists told me they were embracing these ideas not because they really liked them, but because they didn’t feel there was another choice. They were simply trying to be pragmatic. They’d come to accept these dominant political and economic structures that got entrenched during the neoliberal era as settled facts. So, biologists were left with the impossible task of having to figure out how to optimise within those fixed constraints. I think this dynamic – people consenting to play along with solutions they recognised don’t go nearly far enough and might even be a bad idea – is fairly widespread in everyday life.

Looking around, it doesn’t seem like this approach revolutionised conservation…

No, I’m afraid it didn’t, especially when compared with its sweeping promises as a “game-changer” for conservation. Across most indicators, the decimation of life on Earth continues largely on schedule. A recent WWF report revealed that between 1970 and 2020, global wildlife populations declined by 73 per cent, on average. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a million species are currently at risk of extinction. The torrents of private investment and vast new environmental markets that ecosystem service valuations were supposed to unlock simply haven’t materialised at scale, and the funding shortfall in conservation remains as wide as ever. In 2020, the international community failed to meet a single one of its agreed 10-year targets aimed at halting biodiversity loss for the second consecutive decade. I could go on.

Why hasn’t the ecosystem services idea been able to harness market forces?

The reasons why ecosystem services failed to deliver are complex, and usually very contextual, but I would really stress the role of power relations. Take a mangrove forest: you can weigh up the short-term economic benefits of building a shrimp farm over the mangroves against all the other kinds of values that mangroves provide, such as serving as a fish nursery that supports local livelihoods or as storm protection for nearby settlements, and so on. Let’s assume we can develop very detailed, very rigorous calculations of those services, and we might find that it mathematically makes a ton of sense to keep the mangroves, since the overall benefits are much higher for society. But whether the mangroves are going to get demolished or not has less to do with correct arithmetic and a lot more to do with power relations: who stands to benefit from what happens with the land, and who controls the decision-making around who wins and who loses? What is so often lacking in ecosystem services is a deeper analysis of these core power relations driving environmental degradation.

Should we think more about saving nature for its own sake – that is, for its intrinsic value?

I’m not sure that focusing on these tensions between what is called the “intrinsic” value of nature and the more “instrumental” value represented by ecosystem services necessarily gets us that far. I don’t have any objection to people who bring this sort of deep, abiding, ethical set of commitments to nature and who wish to advocate for nature having inherent rights. But whatever your view, what seems more important is whether you are intelligently answering these questions of power and political economy.

How are biologists challenging those in power?

Biologists could take more of a “biodiversity justice” approach and unite with other groups, from social movements and critical scholars to Indigenous peoples, rural peoples, farmers, workers and more. You don’t necessarily have to align yourself with such a narrow set of conventionally powerful actors in business or government.

While researching my book I did start to see mainstream environmental scientists starting to engage with critical scholars who brought with them much more radical and systemic analyses of what was driving the global biodiversity crisis. In turn, I saw biologists learning how to think more rigorously about the larger historical contexts and social struggles surrounding their research. And in certain spaces like those around IPBES, I saw these critical analyses begin to resonate.

Another striking example where conservationists had to look beyond ecosystem services is from back home in British Columbia, around those debates about whether to log the forests. For a while, most of the big environmental groups accepted the need to protect forests by using market language and advocating for market mechanisms. But eventually they ditched ecosystem services and switched their strategies to much more of a “climate justice” framing. Instead of trying to convince decision-makers through lobbying and scientific reports, they formed alliances with other groups, particularly First Nations, and took on these huge fights against energy infrastructure projects, particularly a couple of proposed oil pipelines.

This approach brought a more rigorous account of power, movement building and popular mobilisation at its core. And it was an effective pivot: as they let go of ecosystem services, they succeeded in fending off the pipelines, although those battles are ongoing. My point is there’s a big difference between asking powerful decision-makers for change and building alliances strong enough to force those decision-makers to change.

How would you sum up how you feel about ecosystem services now, having spent so long thinking about it?

There are so many other traditions beyond mainstream conservation with alternative ideas about the means and ends and future of conservation, about what it could be, and who it must involve. There’s nothing inherently stopping biologists from bringing their expertise, including with things like ecosystem services, and realigning their work with other sets of interests and more plausibly transformative plans for confronting the global biodiversity crisis. The potential is there. But biologists first have to try to reach for it.

What can everyday people who love nature do to support this biodiversity justice approach?

Zooming out from these esoteric debates about ecosystem services, what really stayed with me were all these biologists I met who basically shrugged their shoulders, gave me these sad sighs of resignation, and conceded that they didn’t actually believe these strategies were going to work. Yet they still embraced the framework. However disappointing, these decades of failure can also function as an urgent invitation to break from routine but ultimately self-defeating political assumptions, and to reach for more convincing (and yes, more realistic and pragmatic) alternatives.