How Much Are Nature’s Services Worth?
Notes:
Estimates of Human Economic Activities and Ecosystem Services
What are nature’s life-support services worth? Practitioners in the young field of ecological economics believe concrete numbers are required to help nations avoid unsustainable economic choices. In one of the first efforts to calculate a global number, a team of researchers has put an average price tag of US$33 trillion a year on these fundamental ecosystem services. That is nearly twice the value of the global gross national product of US$18 trillion. For more information see http://www.wri.org/trends/ecoserv.html.
Source: Adapted from R. Costanza et al., “The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,” Nature, Vol. 387 (1997), p. 256, Table 2.