There are some who object to valuing nature by specific services, arguing it fails to capture unquantifiable traits of the natural world, such as the psychological wellbeing that it provides. Others say that ecocsystems and living things should be seen as priceless.
But the thinking is that it can motivate people to see natural ecosystems in whole new ways – especially people who only ever think economically. “The whole aim of this concept is to get people to think holistically,” says Rebelo. “In that sense, the concept will always be useful, no matter how flawed it is. The aim is for better stewardship, not only for current generations but future generations.”
So, what can this approach tell us about the value of specific animals? While the majority of calculations take a birds-eye view of ecosystems or services as a whole, some studies have calculated the value of specific taxonomic species, genera or orders.
In 2015, BBC Earth compiled a whole series of these valuations for an interactive game (the site is no longer available online, but the list is archived here). So for example, the total value of sharks for tourism is around $944m (£682m/€799m), the cowpat-tidying services of dung beetles has been estimated at $380m (£274m/€321m), and in Canada alone, polar bears can be valued at $6.3bn (£4.5bn/$5.3bn).
You could, in principle, do some crude sums to calculate the value of each of these individual animals, by dividing by population. That would give a value for each one of the roughly 16,000 Canadian polar bears as around $400,000 per bear (£289,000/€338,000).
But recently, Ralph Chami at the International Monetary Fund and his colleagues applied this kind of “single animal” approach more rigorously. Their goal? To calculate the value for individual African forest elephants, and great whales off the coast of South America.
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