Valuing Nature

An ecological crisis that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore is confronting policymakers with a dilemma: they are being called upon to protect the conditions for life on Earth without overly hampering industrial production and economic growth.

I would like to thank all contributors who took the time to comment on this discussion paper. They have contributed to a public debate about the assumptions and interests behind the new economy with "nature" and its valuation techniques.

Jutta Kill provides an excellent summary of why market-based or market-like valuation of ‘nature’ does not work as a tool for reducing climate change and biodiversity loss but rather is likely to worsen both trends.

We should not completely abandon economic arguments; but instead of hectically following and reinforcing the trend, we should lessen the prominence of these arguments by strongly fostering alternative ones, especially those which relate to the very intuitions and reasons why people protect nature.

Creating the visibility to the economic eye requires abstractions that may in the end result in much more far-reaching changes to how we understand nature than initially imagined. There are three claims implied in this statement.

The new economy of nature tends to produce a similar right to decide what lives and what does not in the /natural world/ according to its economic value for capital, whether that world lies in the hands of corporations or of states.

One of the great merits of Jutta Kill's timely discussion paper is that it shows why current debates over the economic valuation of nature matter.

The monetizing of nature is considered to be a promising tool stressing the economic relevance of environmental protection, however such an approach can pose social, cultural and ecological threats.