Home >> Science & Nature >> Nature

Economic Reasons for Saving Endangered Species

Species are becoming extinct at a rate of between 1,000 and 10,000 times faster than they would naturally, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In 2010, the United Nations declared that it was more economically important to curb the destruction of the natural world than to tackle climate change. Creating and maintaining a comprehensive network of worldwide-protected areas would cost $45 billion annually, reports the Guardian website. The benefits reaped from preserving the richness of species within these zones, however, would amount to between $4 and $5 trillion per year.

Tourism
- As the natural world disappears, what remains becomes valuable in terms of tourism. Ecotourism brings money into an area as well as provides local jobs. The Reuters website states that a hectare of intact coral reef can be worth up to $1 million per year for tourism. Many of the world's most popular ecotourism sites, such as the forests of Costa Rica and Kerala in India, are home to a variety of endangered species.
Medicine
- The pharmaceutical industry is big business. Many companies rely on nature to provide the ingredients for their moneymaking drugs. For example, the malaria drug artemisinin was developed from sweet wormwood. The Reuters website finds that the Pacific yew tree and the Madagascan periwinkle have both provided cancer treatments. Artificially synthesizing these natural combinations of chemicals would cost substantially more money than protecting ecologically diverse habitats.
Biomimicry
- Companies can make money by replicating nature's designs in their products. The most famous example is the invention of Velcro after a Swiss inventor in the 1940s noticed plant burrs stuck to the fur of his dog. The injection point of a mosquito was used as inspiration for hypodermic needles developed by the Terumo Corporation, while the self-cleaning ability of the lotus plant led to the development of self-cleaning paint products by the Sto Corporation. In the future, developments in submarine design may be influenced by the leatherback turtle's ability to dive deeper than other turtles.
Greenhouse Gases
- Tropical rainforests contain nearly a quarter of all of the carbon in our terrestrial biosphere, says the Pulitzer Center; however, many of the countries with remaining, intact rainforests are also the world's poorest. Logging is just one of the many destructive ways countries try to make their resources pay. Since the Copenhagen Accord was agreed at U.N. climate talks in 2009, some poor countries that preserve forests may receive carbon credits that can be sold for cash on the global carbon market.

Nature