The Monetary Worth of Preserving the Ocean

DR. TONY HAYMET, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, gives many examples of how the ocean is worth more intact than irreversibly altered.  From helping to stabilize our climate by regulating heat, to providing medically useful bacteria, to supporting biodiversity, functioning marine ecosystems deliver services that can be evaluated in concrete financial terms.  These services have been undervalued in the past, where only resource extraction was used to calculate the ocean’s monetary worth.

Coral Reef © SFL ORG

Overfishing, plastic pollution, global warming, and ocean acidification all change the ocean in ways that can’t be easily undone.  Ocean conservation, in contrast, looks like a real bargain when all the true costs of destructive environmental practices are factored in. To read more download the following pdf.

Studies referred to in the above article:

Aburto-Oropeza, O., Ezcurra, E., Danemann, G., Valdez, V., Murray, J., and Sala, E. 2008. Mangroves in the Gulf of California increase fishery yields. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (30): 10456–10459

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/30/10456.full.pdf+html

Aburto-Oropeza, O., Erisman, B., Galland, G.R., Mascareñas-Osorio, I., Sala, E., and Ezcurra, E. 2011. Large recovery of fish biomass in a no-take marine reserve. PLoS ONE 6(8): e23601. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023601
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0023601

Blog Author: Lindy Weilgart, Okeanos – Foundation for the Sea