What’s A Swamp Worth? If It's A Mexican Mangrove, US$37,500 per Hectare per Year
by Matthew McDermott, Brooklyn, NY on 07.28.08
photo: Matthew McDermott
We’ve written a number of times about the importance of wetlands in sequestering carbon, preserving biodiversity, and preventing natural disaster. Now researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have put a dollar value on the ecosystem services provided by one type of wetland, Mexican mangrove forest. The figure? US$37,500 per hectare per year.
Their new research published in the Proceedings on the National Academy of Sciences shows that there is a direct relationship between the health of Mexican mangroves and that of the local fishing industry and local economy. Studying the fishing records of four Mexican States for the years 2001-2005, researchers found that fish landings increased with total area of mangrove fringe. Such areas are important feeding and nursing grounds for many varieties of commercially important fish.
Mangrove Conservation and Reconstruction Costly but Vital
Mangroves in the regions studied—Baja California Sur, Nayarit, Sinaloa and Sonora—are disappearing at the rate of 2% per year. Researchers say that reestablishing lost areas of mangrove will be expensive but financially worthwhile, “To recover a mangrove ecosystem takes hundreds of years. It is very expensive, but the costs of its loss are several orders of magnitude greater.”
According to official Mexican figures there are currently about 800,000 hectares of mangroves in the country, of which 10,000 are destroyed each year by development.
The Mexican government gets paid a mere $1020 per hectare by developers when they destroy a portion on mangrove forest.
via :: ENN, :: National Geographic News, :: ISP News
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I hope we learn to put an accurate price on habitat destruction, one that takes into account all the services a habitat provides: filtering our air and water, sequestering carbon and other pollutants, replenishing populations of commercially important wildlife, and harboring as yet undiscovered or unstudied organisms that may provide future benefits in the form of new compounds or medicines, to name the (to me) most obvious ones.
Just as a tax on carbon (thus allowing price to more accurately represent the true cost of energy production) would make nuclear and renewables a whole lot more attractive, an accurate price on undeveloped land would make efficient land use, recycled or sustainably produced materials, and better land management a much better bet. The least expensive resources that can get the job done will be used first, so we'd better make sure the resources we want used up are cheaper than the alternatives.
Mangroves in Oaxaca state and the Yucatan Peninsula are destroyed to build hotels. All this happens when corrupt government officials have a part in the hotel business. Big hotel chain owners pretend not to know about this.
Typical example of the tragedy of the commons