There is no question that nature does provide benefits to people, including economic benefits.

For
example, forest conserved on water catchments maintains a year-round flow of clean water in
streams. Many species produce products that are commercially valuable, for example as medicine,
food, or products such as wood. And there are whole industries based on nature, such as
ecotourism, fisheries and forestry. Natural ecosystems also play critical roles in sequestering carbon
(thus reducing climate change impacts), or preventing soil erosion, or providing coastline defence
(for example coral reefs and mangroves), or providing for spiritual enrichment and recreational
enjoyment (so-called cultural services). As noted earlier, conservation programmes can bring
benefits for local communities, but sometimes the human beneficiaries of ecosystem services are far
distant from the site of the conservation programme (as with climate regulation services for
example). All these benefits that nature provides to humanity go by the technical term “ecosystem
services”. More recently conservationists have started to use the term “natural capital” to refer to
“capital” needed in terms of species and ecosystems in order to deliver the “ecosystem services” on
which people depend.

Image © Michel Roggo

Discussions along these lines have led to serious debates within the conservation community on our
underlying values. Some adherents to so-called “new conservation” have claimed that we should
conserve nature only for the human benefits it provides. At the opposite extreme, others have
claimed that we should conserve nature only for its intrinsic value. In the middle are those who
emphasise that our fundamental conservation ethic is based on intrinsic values, but that in order to
advance the conservation agenda and to win others over, we can make tactical use of nature’s
instrumental values. This debate is made more complex by the fact that people are inevitably part of
nature; we all live in an ecosystem whether we like it or not.

Debates have become particularly heated when some proponents of natural capital have started to
put monetary values on nature. Many of those that emphasise intrinsic values believe that this is
ethically wrong. The danger of putting a monetary value on, say, a forest, is that it could give
justification for destroying that forest if the monetary value of an alternative, destructive land-use is
higher. This is not an academic debate. At the time of writing, there is a proposal to destroy the
Atewa Forest in Ghana because it is sitting on top of a valuable bauxite deposit. But the Atewa Forest
includes many species that occur nowhere else in the world. Mining the bauxite will mean extinction
for these species.