The value of biodiversity

The value of biodiversity includes the economic worth of its different components such as microorganisms and animals used in pharmaceutical and food products, medicinal and edible plants, natural products used in handicraft production, scenic ecosystems and marine life important to eco-tourism. It includes, as well, investments made through local and international agencies for monitoring and sustaining biodiversity. Biodiversity also bears essential scientific, cultural, social and ecological values.

Role, Importance and Value of Biodiversity

One problem facing ecology and economics today is how to measure the value of environmental goods whose destruction (associated with the ever-increasing scale of the human enterprise) generates vast externalities. A prime example of one of those goods is biodiversity - the variety of genetically distinct populations and species of plants, animals, and microorganisms with which Homo sapiens share Earth, and the variety of ecosystems of which they are functioning parts.

Economists and ecologists agree that biodiversity has value to humanity, although whether it has value independent of human needs is less clear. Both groups also agree that the value of biodiversity to humanity has both use and non-use components.

Direct Values

Natural ecosystems provide people with food and innumerable materials of all sorts, from honey and truffles to teak. Most notably, a crucial portion of the protein in our diets comes straight from nature in the form of fish and other animals harvested from the seas. This service is provided by oceans in conjunction with coastal and wetland habitats, which serve as irreplaceable nurseries for marine life that is either harvested directly or used as a food supply by the sea life that we eat.

The active ingredients in at least a third of the prescription drugs used by civilization come directly from or were derived from chemical compounds found in wild plants, fungi, or other organisms, especially in tropical forests - digitalis, morphine, quinine, and antibiotics being among the most familiar.

Natural ecosystems maintain a vast genetic library from which Homo sapiens has already drawn the very basis of civilization and which promises untold future benefits. That library of millions of different species and billions of genetically distinct populations is what biologists are referring to when they speak of biotic diversity, or biodiversity.

Indirect Values

Humanity, of course, is dependent for its very existence on other organisms, but in ways that are rarely recognized in formal economic analyses. It must be emphasized that it is not just preserving samples of the world’s genetic diversity (as might conceivably, but not practically, be done through a vast network of seed banks, botanic gardens, and zoos) that is important. Other organisms, in all their extraordinary variety, are part and parcel of a global life-support system that benefits them and humanity as well. We not only sprang from other life ourselves, we are completely dependent on it to maintain the habitability of this planet.

Perhaps the most basic dependence of humanity on other organisms is through the process of photosynthesis. That is the process by which green plants, algae, and some microorganisms bind solar energy into chemical bonds of carbohydrate molecules (sugars, starches, cellulose). That chemical energy can be used to drive the life processes of organisms, mostly by combining it with oxygen in a slow burning process known as cellular respiration (or just respiration). The vast majority of non photosynthesizers - human beings and other animals, fungi, and many microorganisms - must obtain their energy from photosynthesizers, either by eating them or by eating other animals that do.