How much is all the life on Earth worth?

_Elsa_

‘In 1997, ecologist Robert Costanza and his colleagues estimated that the biosphere provides services worth around $33 trillion a year. For comparison, they noted that the entire global economy at the time produced around $18 trillion a year. Unchecked species loss would wipe 18% off global economic output by 2050

Five years later, the team took the argument a step further by asking how much we would gain by conserving biodiversity. They concluded that the benefits would outweigh the costs by a factor of 100. In other words, conserving nature is a staggeringly good investment.

By contrast, letting species decline and go extinct looks like a bad move. A 2010 study concluded that unchecked species loss would wipe 18% off global economic output by 2050. You may perhaps be feeling that all this talk of economics and growth is strange. It's all rather cold and heartless, without any of the love for the natural world that we were talking about earlier. Well, many environmentalists feel the same way.

Humans are encroaching on the wild areas. The environmentalist journalist George Monbiot has been a particularly vocal critic. Monbiot argues that the valuations are unreliable, which allows those in power to rig the accounting however they see fit. If someone wants to build a road through an important habitat, they can simply overestimate the benefits of the road and downplay those from the wildlife.

Many conservation groups now support putting a value on ecosystems.  "Forests, fish stocks, biodiversity, hydrological cycles become owned, in effect, by the very interests – corporations, landlords, banks – whose excessive power is most threatening to them," Monbiot wrote in 2013.

He may well be right that any such system would be open to abuse. The counter argument is that without such a system, the abuse happens anyway – which is why many conservation groups now support putting a value on ecosystems. In fact, one of the good things about the idea of ecosystem services is that it is all-encompassing. As a result, the weaker arguments we mentioned before now start to make some sense. ’ (Source)

Let’s continue - Wild nature is staggeringly beautiful

Start at the beginning - The ecosystem and how it relates to endangered species