Interview: How putting a price on nature could help protect the environment

Efforts to address climate change and safeguard the natural world, treated as separate issues for far too long, are now beginning to converge through multilateral processes, civil society engagement and the private sector. While spiritual practices and traditional knowledge have held reverence and respect for nature, market forces have typically undervalued ecology and prioritised development choices that have destroyed ecosystems and indigenous communities across the world.

In The Case for Nature, Siddarth Shrikanth argues that it is not too late for the financial system to mainstream the logic of “natural capital” and assign dollar and biophysical values to the variety of services that ecosystems provide, ranging from food, fuel and fibre, to their integral role in the climate crisis.

“We know nature is priceless, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have value,” said Shrikanth in an interview. The idea of natural capital is already in application but in a narrow way, in an equation “almost always tilted towards more extraction”, he said. “This framework looks more broadly at nature’s value, recognising that that’s not the whole of its value.” He argues that there is a growing imperative as well as new streams of capital to protect existing wild and wondrous places and restore habitats…

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