There is an idea among conservationists and sustainability advocates that if the economic value of natural resources, especially water, were truly apparent, that there would be more concern among lawmakers and business leaders to protect them.
 |
This idea may take more credence with the new administration’s seeming plan to weaken the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Can we put a price on nature? Let’s take a look at some ideas floating around.
Natural Resource Damage
Through enforcement actions, the EPA and the Department of Justice can collect fines for natural resource damages. For example, defendants in a case involving an oil spill from a vessel, were required to pay almost $3 million to restore the injury to natural resources resulting from the spill.
Natural resource damage recovery through enforcement actions may take a dive with the upcoming administration, but there are ideas out there that money can be saved and more feasible business outcomes can be had by taking nature into account in the initial steps of a business decision.
Let’s take a look at a couple—one from government and one from business.
Ecosystem Markets
According to the EPA, businesses, called ecosystem markets, are emerging that provide a way to safeguard the goods and services we get from ecosystems. Through markets, interested parties can pay for landowners or managers to protect or restore ecosystems. For example, a sewage treatment plant might pay a third-party broker for nearby landowners to plant filter strips along water bodies to reduce pollution or improve fish habitat.
Benefits of these markets, according to the Agency, include:
- Offering additional revenue to farmers and ranchers, and helping to protect agricultural land from conversion;
- Increasing opportunities for investment; and
- Meeting regulatory compliance or promoting voluntary conservation.
Through its EnviroAtlas database, the EPA provides ecosystem market maps where you can see where markets have been implemented and learn more about those markets.
Factoring in Nature
Perhaps one of the more interesting tools for businesses in the idea of factoring in nature in business decisions comes from The Earth Genome.
The idea behind this project is that business leaders, government officials, and investors are not taking advantage of the environmental data out there in making decisions such as corporate site selections, or maximizing supply chain resilience, or prioritizing investments to address how droughts, floods, and poor water quality can threaten their facilities.
Problem: The raw environmental data is there, but it is too overwhelming and what is missing is the translation of the data into financial value. The Earth Genome purports to pull together datasets from public and private sources; put the datasets into a manageable and accessible operating systems; provide tools and apps to visualize, translate, and interpret the datasets for financial value to end users; and provide a technology platform to enable one-stop shopping and interoperability for the apps and data needed to make decisions.
The Earth Genome is still in its infant stage, but it is worth a look.
We’d Like to Hear from You
Does the idea of factoring nature in business decisions make sense to you? What are the best projects or tools that you have run across that can help in determining the true costs of natural resources?