The costs of saving nature: Does it make "cents"?

Abstract

Clearing wild forests to grow food, fibre, and fuel products can deliver large financial gains. However, the benefits that people obtain from forests-known as ecosystem services-are rarely considered in economic calculations, partly because there are few markets onto which they can be traded. In some regions, the benefits delivered by nature might be more economically valuable. A new study maps where it is profitable to replace tropical forests with cropland and how this might change under future agricultural production and carbon prices. The findings address a major applied challenge by helping to identify sites where forest conservation can be economically viable.

Fig 1. Hypothetical trade-offs between the value of ecosystem services and agricultural revenue in 2 landscapes with contrasting forest cover.

Aerial images sourced from the LINZ Data Service (www.linz.govt.nz) and licensed for reuse under CC-BY 3.0.

Fig 2. Monetary value of ecosystem services in tropical forests.

Bars are medians, boxes are interquartile ranges, and whiskers are the full range of values for each of 11 ecosystem services. The monetary values compiled by Reference [15] were standardised into 2016 international dollars per hectare per year by Carrasco et al. [16] and are available therein as S1 Data. Ecosystem services were classified into 3 broader categories: provisioning, regulating, or cultural. n is the number of studies for each ecosystem service and is scaled proportionately to sample size.