Photograph by Maewenn Bourcelot
Words by Paula DiPerna
Paula DiPerna is a writer and author of Pricing the Priceless. She has served as president of the Joyce Foundation alongside her vice presidency for public policy at the Chicago Climate Exchange. This Points of View article reflects her opinions, not necessarily those of Atmos.
For centuries, we have measured prosperity in numbers that leave out the most important contributor of all: nature.
Imagine a canoe cutting silently through a mangrove channel in Myanmar, the water barely rippling. The luscious, green paradise is idyllic; but for the mangrove, like so much of nature, scenes like this are also hard work: labor-intensive, constant, indispensable, and, notably, free of cost. In our business ledgers, nature’s worth registers as nothing at all.
That absence has a price. By assigning nature no economic value, we have for decades taken it for granted and treated its labor as if it were free, allowing a global feeding frenzy of extraction and depletion without budgeting for the long-term costs. Economists now warn that this “free ride” is one of the drivers of the climate crisis plaguing our planet—and that the math of our economy is at odds with the math of the Earth. To put it bluntly, nature may be the most exploited worker in the history of the world.
Mangroves epitomize the dilemma. Far from being idle, they provide what scientists call “ecosystem services”: filtering pollutants from water, providing protected breeding grounds for fish and other sea creatures, and buffering coasts from the ravages of hurricanes and rising seas. But because these benefits are excluded from standard economic accounting, mangroves have time and again been cleared, paved, and treated as wastelands. Today, more than a quarter of mangroves worldwide have been destroyed due to human activity.
The logic is perverse. Imagine if companies did not have to legally pay for their workforce. Their profits would appear immense, but only because the true costs—human effort, labor rights—remained hidden. That, in essence, is how our economies treat nature. Every dollar that pops out of an ATM, every quarterly profit report, rests on the unpaid work and raw materials derived from the living systems that sustain us. And like any account run on credit, the bill is coming due.
Renowned economist Sir Partha Dasgupta put it starkly in his landmark The Economics of Biodiversity review: Managing ecological assets requires the same respect and care as managing financial assets. Neglecting them leads, inevitably, to depreciation. In planetary terms, that depreciation is now accelerating. The latest science shows just how far that depreciation has gone. The 2023 update to the “Planetary Boundaries” framework found that six of Earth’s nine life-support systems—including climate stability, biosphere integrity, and freshwater—have already crossed into dangerous zones. In accounting terms, we are overspending our natural capital and, in the process, eroding the very principle of life itself.
“If GDP counted nature’s losses as well as its gains, it would show that much of what we call growth is actually a decline in the natural systems our wealth depends on.”
How do we stop? By flipping valuation systems—the very infrastructure that drives global decision-making—so they work for nature, not against it.
Take GDP, the basic measure of economic health and political success. It credits the clear-cutting of a forest as growth, but ignores the long-term financial costs of lost flood protection, carbon storage, and biodiversity. It adds the price of oil spills to the tally, but never subtracts the damage done to ecosystems. A 2023 United Nations Environment Programme report estimated that $7 trillion—roughly 7% of global GDP—is generated annually by activities that actively degrade nature. That figure is almost certainly an underestimate, since it counts only direct impacts.
If GDP counted nature’s losses as well as its gains, it would show that much of what we call growth is actually a decline in the natural systems our wealth depends on.
Capital flows tell a similar story. Investments by banks, pension funds, and private corporations still tilt toward “nature-negative” activities. But new models show how finance could be redirected. Consider the Forest Resilience Bond, a conservation finance model first launched near Lake Tahoe to help reduce wildfire risk. Investors provide upfront capital to pay for fire prevention practices and are repaid by utilities, insurers, and tourism operators who save money when fires are avoided. Over time, investors are paid back with a premium. The first bond raised $4 million and repaid investors in full; subsequent rounds have scaled up to $25 million. In principle, such instruments could be applied globally to fund the resilience of forests, wetlands, and other critical ecosystems.
Even profit and loss statements, the bedrock of accounting, can be retooled. In 2011, Puma released the world’s first Environmental Profit and Loss Statement, a climate take on the classic financial report all businesses must produce and present for audit. The company reported more than $237 million in earnings, but it also calculated what it would owe if nature’s services were priced: more than $170 million. Had every company been required to disclose such figures, investors and regulators could no longer ignore the dependency of profits on the depletion or protection of natural capital.
Vital to understand is that valuing nature or investing in nature as an asset does not mean nature is necessarily sold off. In fact, it means the opposite. Assigning tangible value to nature means that its intangible benefits demand protection.
“How do we stop? By flipping valuation systems—the very infrastructure that drives global decision-making—so they work for nature, not against it.”
Perhaps the most undeniably priceless assets on Earth are the rainforests, most of which are now under threat from deforestation. These forests are fountains of biodiversity and providers of essential ecosystem services, from regulating rainfall to storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide. What if we treated those services as the global economic assets they are? Imagine estimating the value of the benefits rainforests generate worldwide and compensating rainforest nations annually for that contribution. Put that way, the question of debt is reversed: If industrialized countries rely on the biodiversity and carbon storage maintained by poorer, less industrialized nations, who is truly the debtor and who the creditor?
For example: A fair system of compensation would reward stewardship by enforcing biodiversity-rich nations to direct funds from international payments toward human development needs while also investing in practices that make economic and ecological sense. In practice, that could mean channeling resources so governments see more value in preserving forests than in clearing them.
Of course, to put a price on the priceless is to invite paradox. What is unique and irreplaceable can never be captured in a dollar figure. There’s also the moral hazard: Once given a price tag, rainforests or rivers risk being reduced to commodities that are traded, speculated on, or even abused, especially if the accounting is driven by markets. Critiques of market influence often draw on core beliefs associated with Indigenous communities, that the worth of nature lies in the intangible relationships of reciprocity and responsibility, which cannot be reduced to any tangible price tag.
But pretending nature has no value at all is even more dangerous. We arrived at this precipice through greed and corruption, yes, but also through a willful blindness to the fact that our economies rest on ecological foundations. And reframing nature as an asset means forcing our economic systems to acknowledge what Indigenous knowledge systems have long insisted: that the health of people and the health of the Earth are inseparable. It could also shift debates closer to home. Imagine if education, public health, or the arts—often dismissed as unnecessary “costs” in federal budgets—were recognized as assets essential to prosperity. The same must be true for nature.
We must accept the paradox, or risk rendering beyond repair what is most essential to us. The ambiguity may trouble us, even surpass us. But such are the complexities of our age: to reconcile irreconcilables, to assign tangible worth to the intangibles that make up the global commons—the foundation of our existence, long treated as inexhaustible. The alternative is already upon us and, as I argued in my book Pricing the Priceless, the urgency to restructure our economic system could not be clearer. Valuing nature will never be simple. But our wealth, our health, and our future all depend on it.
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.
The Most Essential Worker in History Has Never Been Paid
