Ocean Health Index Accounts for Human Benefits - Miller-McCune
With November elections upon us, we’re deluged with political speeches promising us happier and healthier lives, better jobs, a cleaner environment, and so on. It’s easy to get caught up in the political rhetoric, but it is also critical to step back and consider the source.
In a speech given on the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, its founder drew a direct link between economic and ecological vitality. “The wealth of a nation is in its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity … that’s all there is,” said Sen. Gaylord Nelson. “That’s the whole economy. That’s where all the economic activity and jobs come from. These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world.”
More than 15 years later, the late senator’s message resonates with a growing movement that aims to account for this flow of benefits from nature to people and translate it into action. Leaders from the scientific community, local governments, businesses, and entire nations are designing and implementing innovative ways to better capture the value of nature’s benefits in their decision-making.
As we discussed in earlier columns on the Ocean Health Index, some of these benefits, like food, are already a fundamental part of our economy. Others, such as having a clean beach or knowing that a coral reef is there (its so-called “existence value”) tend to be undervalued. That means we as a society don’t fully account for the true costs or benefits of our decisions on the planet.
This view of nature as a provider of services to people has its critics. Many assume that “value” means dollars and argue that a price cannot be put on nature. Yet values can be measured in ways that have nothing to do with money. Others argue that nature should be conserved out of moral obligation, rather than the purely pragmatic view of what it can do for us. Importantly, viewing nature through the lens of how people benefit from it does not undermine or replace its intrinsic value, but instead includes and complements it.
The bottom line is that in this era of unprecedented change (we’ve even shifted into a new geologic era — the Anthropocene), it is vital to reconnect human progress to the capacity of the planet to support it.
The Ocean Health Index is designed to do just this. As we’ve mentioned in past articles in this series, the index defines health through the delivery of a spectrum of social benefits, now and in the future. This set of public goals serves as a filter. One of the major hurdles we faced at the outset of this project was to whittle down the laundry list of hundreds of things we could include in the index to a more manageable number that would be feasible to assess in different places around the world.