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"I keep wondering - are there two kinds of money, is there one kind of money used for bailing out banks and another, rare, kind of money which is used to save the earth and its living fabric." - Paven Sukhdev, head of the United Nation's Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity initiative


You pull into the petrol station to fill up, buy some chocolate and todays newspaper.

On all three you will pay far more than they cost to produce and distribute. The price that you pay covers the cost of a whole range of products and services that go into making the stuff. This may include the materials to make the product, and the services required in getting the materials, the labour involved in making the product, and services required in getting the product to you.

But notice anything? Very few things have the environmental costs and services built into them. Do you ever see anything whose price includes the cost of the fresh air and pollination required to grow the food that you're eating? How many of us even give a thought to what these costs might be and how much we should be paying? More to the point, what is the value of Mother Nature's life giving products and services worth?

Let's face it; all of the planet's economies would soon collapse without fertile soil, fresh water, breathable air, and an amenable climate. But more often than not, this doesn't translate into any meaningful number (or any number at all) when we think about the resource use and policy decisions needed to manage our landscapes and waterways.

People working in the young field of ecological economics believe that more concrete numbers are required to help nations avoid economic choices that degrade both their natural resources and the vital services that healthy natural ecosystems provide.

In one of the first efforts to calculate the global price tag of ecosystem services, a team of researchers from the United States, Argentina, and the Netherlands has put an average price tag of US$33 trillion a year on these fundamental ecosystem services, which are largely taken for granted because they are free. That is nearly twice the value of the global gross national product (GNP) of US$18 trillion.

Ecosystem services, free but valuable