- [Mike Hoss] At daybreak,
Katrina was roaring.
And visibility was next to nothing.
Just after nine o'clock in the morning,
Captain Paul Helmers,
an 18-year veteran,
saw something he wasn't expecting.
Water rising in the back parking lot.
- [Paul Helmers] I would
say about ten minutes
after we saw it rising
I was pretty certain
that the levy had to be breached.
It was rising at such a rate.
- [Female Narrator] You've
probably never thought
about ecosystems as one of
the first lines of defense
when it comes to human self-preservation.
After all here we are,
tucked away in our fancy shelters,
masters of our universes.
Even able to print food from a 3D printer.
We couldn't possibly rely on something,
say like, coastal marshes
to offer protection.
- [Male Narrator] Unless you
live somewhere near the coast
and you don't realize
that when a storm surges
its these coastal marshes
that absorb winds and waves,
dialing down the damaging
effects of a storm
as it moves inland.
Its like having your own renewable
army corps of engineers.
- [Female Narrator] Ecosystems
also provide us with food,
clean air, and fresh water.
Try to live without one
of those three resources
and see how far your 3D
printer will get you.
- [Male Narrator] So what if nature went
calculus rogue on us?
Branded us a bunch of bottom feeders
and told us the free ride was over?
What if all the ecosystems
could band together
and demand a fee for their life-sustaining
protective services?
What would that price tag be?
- [Female Narrator]
According to Carl Zimmer
writing for the New York Times,
in 1997 a team of scientists
assessed the worth of ecosystems worldwide
and published their findings
in the journal "Nature,"
in which they concluded that
cost of services rendered
would be 33 trillion dollars,
about 48.7 trillion dollars today.
- [Male Narrator] We're
talking about services like
soaking up our dirty laundry
in the form of greenhouse emissions.
These kinds of services,
it was determined,
were twice as valuable
as the gross national product
of every country on earth in 1997.
- [Female Narrator] But
a new study by one of
"Nature" journal's 1997
authors, Robert Costanza,
takes a deeper dive into
the economics of ecosystems
and comes up with a
significantly higher price tag
that ecosytems might bill us for.
To the tune of 142.7 trillion dollars.
- [Male Narrator] Costanza
and his colleagues
combed through hundreds of new studies
on ecosystems and their
roles in sustaining
and protecting the
environment and its species,
including us bipedal hominids.
They also looked at 17 services
in 16 different kinds of ecosystems
like mangroves and tropical rainforests
to better understand the sort of assists
provided by nature on a daily basis.
- [Female Narrator] Natural
structures like coral reefs
provide some of the
most expensive services
at about 995,000 dollars a year
for each acre.
In addition to their regular day jobs
sustaining ocean life,
they also weaken waves
helping to protect against soil erosion
when those less powerful waves reach land.
Not to mention generating
hundreds of billions of
dollars a year from tourism,
as well as recreational
and commercial fishing.
- [Male Narrator] The problem is
that this incredibly valuable service,
covering less than one percent
of the earth's surface,
is diminishing every year.
For instance, from 1997 to 2011,
the world's reefs shrank from 240,00 acres
to just 108,000 acres.
Thanks to pollution and
human activity like dredging,
coastal development, and overfishing.
- [Female Narrator] Now
consider deforestation
and other man-made
changes to our environment
and you can see that in
earth's annual financial report
there's a devastating
blow to our net worth.
- [Male Narrator] So if
an image of polar bears
scrambling over yet another chunk of ice
melting into oblivion isn't
enough of a rally cry,
well, maybe reimagining
that chunk of frozen water
as a dense wedge of millions of dollars
dissolving into a liquid
will do the trick.
- [Female Narrator] So
does reimagining the earth
as just a collection of
a bunch of dollars signs
change your view of conservation?
Let us know in the comments below.
