This article is written by Dr. Enric Sala, explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society

For the last decade, my colleagues and I have met with presidents, prime ministers, and ministers of the environment to persuade them to protect some of the most wonderful places in the ocean.

Almost inevitably, the conversation will come around to two questions: What about the fisheries? Won’t a protected area destroy their business? It’s the opportunity cost that scares these decision-makers, regardless of the future sustainability of their current activities.

That’s the main reason why we don’t have more protected areas: Not because there is no scientific justification and not because there is no public demand for them, but because there is a perceived cost that will be felt by economically important extractive activities, whether it’s logging in a forest, agriculture in the plains, or fishing at sea.

Industry lobbies have a set playbook that they have been using successfully over time, scaring governments about the cataclysmic economic impact of protecting more of the natural world.

A classic case of such hyperbole occurred in 2017 when we asked the Mexican government to protect an area of 150,000 square kilometers (57,915 square miles) in the Pacific around the Revillagigedo archipelago south of Baja California.

Representatives of Mexico’s tuna fishing industry claimed they catch most of their tuna in that area, and that establishing protections would sink their business and put thousands of families out of work.

Furthermore, they argued, it would cause a decline in the tuna supply, which would raise the price of a can of tuna and cause public riots. The Mexican government could never agree to that.

We had heard this type of baseless exaggeration before. But we had facts to counter their claims. First of all, tuna are migratory species. They swim long distances throughout the year, so those not caught around the Revillagigedo Islands could be caught elsewhere.

Furthermore, satellite data from transponders required on all tuna fishing vessels showed that the Mexican fleet caught less than 4% of its tuna in the area. In fact, the data showed that three-quarters of their catch came from international waters, beyond Mexico’s jurisdiction.

So we were able to call them on their lies, and then we went on to show them, using the findings I have shared in this book, that the reserve would benefit marine biodiversity and not affect their bottom line.

Because it is always about the bottom line. In my experience, there is a 95% probability that the first question a finance minister will ask when discussing creating a protected area is, “How much is this going to cost?”

Quarterly financial returns for companies and investors, annual GDP growth for countries: those are our modern golden idols

There is a clear moral argument for protecting more of the natural world. There is an even stronger human survival argument, because the loss of all ecosystem services would mean global human extinction.

Thus, the value of the natural world must be infinite. Yet the traditional economic argument, win-lose in its assumptions, is prevalent in policymaking today. One reason is that political cycles are much shorter than ecological cycles. Short-term gain typically trumps long-term benefits.

“Shareholder value” is the mantra of public corporations, in particular those driving decisions affecting the ecological and climate crisis, and those assessments are also short term. Quarterly financial returns for companies and investors, annual GDP growth for countries: those are our modern golden idols.

Everything else, including our well-being, is subservient to them. A finance minister tends to think about the opportunity costs of conservation—the forgone fishing or logging profits—plus the management costs of a protected area, which all add up to a resource sink that has to be funded by the government. But might not the benefits of protection offset those costs?

There’s bad and good news. The bad news is that our overuse of the natural world, in addition to crippling our life-support system, is costing us seven trillion dollars every year. By 2050, those costs could rise to $28 trillion.

The good news is that protecting our ecosystems can generate more value than if we were to convert them to agricultural monocultures or exploit them to the limit. Supporting a system of well-managed protected areas over a third of our planet, land and sea, could cost on average $140 billion a year – less than what the world spends today on video games.

That’s a cheap investment to maintain a $125 trillion life-support system! Moreover, the economic benefits would outweigh the costs by a ratio of at least 5 to 1; global economic output would rise by almost $1 trillion. But some people—including finance ministers—will still say that this is impossible, that it’s too expensive and we don’t have the money.

Do you know how much governments are spending to subsidise activities that destroy nature? Five hundred billion dollars every year. The money is there; we just use it to subsidise the destruction of our life support system.

This is an excerpt from the book, the Nature of Nature

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