The Economic Value of Ecosystem Services

The economic value of ecosystem services is difficult to calculate, and this raises several important problems when we look at biodiversity in the context of public policy. How can we measure the economic value of ecosystem services such as water purification, or resistance to environmental disturbances? Since the maintenance of biodiversity involves choices and ultimately, costs, how can markets reflect and distribute these values appropriately?

The task may be somewhat easier in the case of new products and materials that are derived from the natural world. Prospecting for new pharmaceuticals is the most publicized, but not the only example. New food crops are also a possibility, although to date there have been very few such introductions that have achieved more than regional importance, either dietarily or economically. More intriguing, perhaps, is the use of genetic engineering to extract biochemical processes from the natural world. Research of this kind has found application in biological clean-up, or bioremediation of toxic waste and oil spills. An even more promising and somewhat more controversial opportunity is found in harnessing processes at the most fundamental levels of biological structure.

The pool of resources hidden in the genetic resources of living things is potentially huge. An example is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that is used in genetic research and in commercial applications to manipulate DNA. The ready availability of substances that speed up the rate at which the cells replicate--the catalysts that in living matter are proteins known as enzymes--has literally made genetic engineering practical on industrial scales.

The enzymes used to catalyze PCR were first isolated from bacteria that can survive only in high temperatures, and the source from which they were taken was natural hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. In this case, to say that an entire new industry depended on the diversity of organisms and habitats in the National Park system is no exaggeration. Substantial prospecting is now underway in these and other extreme environments to find enzymes that will catalyze other, industrially-useful reactions