Coastal cities around the world are being squeezed by two opposing forces: urban sprawl and rising sea levels. This struggle is prominent in the plains of South Florida. There, fast-growing neighborhoods regularly flood, salt water inundation damages estuaries and protects communities from the worst of the climate crisis.
There, enormous resources are invested in environmental remediation projects, and development requires multiple layers of approval. However, in 2022, the Miami-Dade County Commissioner voted to expand the legal boundary to include sprawl to allow a 400-acre warehouse project. They do not understand the value of this land in the larger ecosystem. Paving blocks waterways that maintain an important buffer against flooding and erosion.
Wetlands, coastal plains, dunes, forests, and many other permeable surfaces do what billions of dollars of designed levees, breakwaters, and pumps do for cheap (or free). increase. Protect surrounding land from storm surges, flooding, erosion and pollution. They are the critical infrastructure that increases our resilience to climate change, and the costs of destroying or weakening them must be factored into the decisions we make to build and grow.
This requires weighing the economic incentives to develop natural landscapes against the protective economic value that land already provides. Economists call this a “damage avoided” assessment. Local planning committees may consider the value of dunes, oyster reefs, or wetlands in flood protection and the cost of replacing them with breakwaters and water pump systems. How can these “ecosystem services” withstand, say, 30 years of emergency operations, utility failures, and repeated rebuilding costs? Restoring saves money, time, and lives.
The concept of ‘natural capital’, the idea that ecosystem services should be valued like all forms of wealth, dates back to the 1970s. For example, the market has always valued timber as a commodity, but not the services associated with its production, such as soil maintenance, carbon storage, erosion control, and nutrient cycling. We didn’t need a market for resources that industry saw as plentiful and endlessly renewable. This exploitative assumption turned out to be very wrong. The inability to measure the benefits of ecosystem services in policy and management decisions is a major reason why many of these ecosystems have disappeared. In one of many recent corrections to previous misconceptions about the value of nature, a 2021 World Bank report says that natural capital should redefine wealth.
Climate change is making the underestimation of ecosystem services even more dangerous. Wetlands that mitigate flooding within communities during infrequent catastrophic floods will have much greater economic value in 2050 when damaging storms become more frequent. The value of conserved forests is immeasurable if new pathogens can be prevented from emerging and becoming pandemics. Clearly, the monetary valuation of nature is difficult to estimate and has practical limits. They are also highly site-specific, with different protection values depending on the density of people, industry, and infrastructure around them. It is difficult to create a template that will help municipalities of all kinds handle calculations on natural assets.
Also, it seems ridiculous to spend so much money on an ecosystem that we would rather see as precious, exist for itself, and be of value to humans in a way that transcends capitalism. I think This preciousness is ethically sound. But developers have long confused the valuable with the worthless, allowing them to make a profit without paying for the consequences of environmental destruction. It is impossible to avoid turning off. For example, the affordable housing crisis in the US cannot be ignored. But protecting nature as infrastructure is in line with what many city planners are looking for as a solution. That means moving away from single-family zoning restrictions to allow for multi-family and mixed-use construction and communal spaces that reduce reliance on cars. Basically, less sprawl.
Economic value is not the only reason nature is worth protecting. It is simply a powerful underutilized tool to help make decisions about how to live more sustainably in a climate-changed world. , they may realize how deeply dependent we are.
