Bats, the world’s only flying mammals, spend most of their lives eating. In North America, most of them prey on insects – things like mosquitoes, moths and leafhoppers. As many as they can catch 1,000 bugs within an hour
We benefit from the dietary preferences of bats. In addition to limiting the number of disease-carrying, skin-biting mosquitoes, bats eat insects that damage our crops, such as corn earworms. They voluntarily provide pest control services for farmers across the country.
What is the price of that service?
That’s a question people like Amy Ando are looking to answer.
One of the few environmental economists in the country, Professor Ando of Ohio State University, tries to put a price tag on animals and ecosystems to ensure they are sufficiently valuable in our modern economy. Protecting nature from many threats such as deforestation and climate change can be costly. Ando’s goal is to ensure that the benefits of those safeguards are not overlooked.
A paper In his, published in 2022, he and Dale Manning, another researcher, estimated the financial loss to farmers of a wildlife disease. White-nose syndrome That has wiped out bats across the United States. By detailing those losses in dollars, the authors make a strong case for spending money to protect bats against disease.
Vox reporters Benji Jones and Byrd Pinkerton spoke with Ando for an episode inexplicable The episode is part of a special series on economic mysteries.
A portion of their conversation, edited for clarity, is included below.
Benji Jones
First, what is an environmental economist?
Amy Ando
Many people think that these two terms, environment and economy are opposites because economic activity often damages the environment.
Environmental economists do a few things that are really important to protecting the environment. We design policies; We try to understand how environmental policies affect human behavior, which causes environmental problems. We also do what we call non-market valuations. Government decisions involve the benefits and costs of closing transactions, which are measured in dollars. So when you say there is going to be a cost to protect the environment, what are the benefits that go along with it? We try to measure them.
Benji Jones
So if, say, a city wants to build a park, someone like you can come in and say something like: “While yes this park will be expensive, its green space will provide X amount of value to the citizens of the city”?
Amy Ando
That’s right, and we can express that value in different ways. We can say that your citizens would be better off and hypothetically willing to pay $1 billion for that park. We can also say that this park will increase the housing value of your city by 10 percent and will increase tax revenue by X amount. And it may actually be that the park pays for itself.
Benji Jones
What is the essence of what you’re doing here? It seems controversial.
Amy Ando
Yes. And when we put it this way, it’s controversial.
One of the basic features of economics is that we treat goods as interchangeable. So, for example, I would trade one unit of bananas for three units of pizza. The challenge is that some things in nature are less interchangeable; Some things are irreversible. This comes up a lot when we are talking about biodiversity. There are some human value structures where this whole approach is abhorrent.
But the government has to take a decision. We are always making decisions about what regulations we are going to put in place and what we are going to invest in conservation. The framework that the United States has in place to make these decisions tends to use cost-benefit analysis. And if you don’t have a dollar amount for nature to balance with a dollar amount for spending, it’s hard to think you’re really doing a thorough job of analysis.
We can’t just wave our hands and say, “Oh, well, nature. It’s important.” Some people really need to hear the dollar value.
Benji Jones
An example comes from a paper you published in 2022 about the cost of losing bats. what have you learned
Amy Ando
Around 2006, some bat colonies in the cave began developing a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome. It was very scary. In some parts of the country, bat populations have truly been decimated.
Those who study bats and love them the most are saddened by this, but we are also concerned because bats play an important role in nature and for humans – because they eat our insects. They eat bugs that eat crops.
Now, there are things we can do to help bats not get sick, but they are expensive. They involve people walking through bat caves filled with guano [bat poop]. They come at a cost, both in dollar value and human labor. So are these efforts worth it? If you are the government, is this an investment worth making?
Our task was to try to quantify the benefits that bats have in important ways for government and the public [to know if the cost of helping them outweighs the cost of not].
Benji Jones
How can you think of this? How do you put a price on a bat?
Amy Ando
We did not base the price of the bat but on its performance.
Inherent in nature [inherent] value, but it also has practical value to people. We call that value ecosystem services. The ecosystem service of bats that we put a dollar value on is pest control, which is an alternative to pesticide use.
We couldn’t ask the bats how many bugs they ate. Instead, we had to ask ourselves how bat pest control services appeared in the market — specifically, the farmland market.
If you’re a farmer looking for land to rent, you’ll want to know how profitable that land will be. How much does the crop cost? What is my input value? This includes how much they can spend on pesticides. All of this goes into calculating farmland profitability and farmland demand.
When there aren’t many bats and farmers have to spend a lot of money on pesticides, farming becomes less profitable. They are going to lease less acres. And it will reduce the price of agricultural land. We’re going to see fewer acres farmed.
Benji Jones
So farmland should be more expensive if there are more bats in the area because you’ll use less pesticides?
Amy Ando
exactly We used USDA data on cultivated acres and average cropland rental rates by county. We also needed data on what was happening to the bats. We used data that showed which counties had white-nose syndrome each year. So we were able to track the spread of white-nose syndrome over time to see what effect it had on acres planted and the rental value of farmland.
Benji Jones
what do you get
Amy Ando
We found that losing bats in a county reduced land prices, land rents, by about $3 an acre. There were also spillover effects. Counties with white-nose syndrome did not fall. Neighboring counties also felt some impact, which makes sense because bats fly.
That ends up being a lot of money. The bottom line is that costs [US] Society of White-Nose Syndrome, total, $420 to $500 million annually. That’s a pretty conservative number, and it’s pretty big.
If farmers have to alternate free pest control with an input-based pest control [i.e., pesticides]This means that farming is more expensive, and this will increase the cost of goods.
Benji Jones
What kind of numbers do you miss?
Amy Ando
Every economic study can only capture one thing. Here we assume a “value of use” for bats. Use values are things like pest control, pollination, flood control, nutrient cycling, food – practical things.
Humans have “non-use value” for animals – intrinsic values, spiritual values. Bats are quiet. Bats are cute. Bats are really interesting. Non-use values are unclear. This is particularly relevant for animals that humans do not interact with at all, such as distant species such as whales. Most people don’t benefit from whales very directly, but they are great. This is why we see people donating money to funds to save species that they will never interact with on a personal basis.
Benji Jones
How do you study the non-use value of animals, it’s so elusive?
Amy Ando
It’s hard to estimate non-use values because you can’t just look at market data. We need to use surveys.
One approach is to estimate people’s “willingness to pay” for nature. It’s a way to capture the value that anyone has for a thing. This is relatively conservative as it is a budget-constrained concept. You cannot pay more than you are willing to pay.
A different concept is “willing to accept.” I live in a world with polar bears. I live in a world where there are monarch butterflies. What would you have to pay me to complete – to compensate me – if one of these species became extinct?
Estimates may be too large to be willing to accept, especially if you’re talking about sacred things, although some cultures consider dollar values unacceptable in nature.
Benji Jones
You have done a study looking at the non-use value of grassland. Can you tell us about that?
Amy Ando
It was in Illinois and we were asking people about tallgrass prairie restoration. Tallgrass Prairie is beautiful. It is full of wild flowers. And there isn’t much of it. So we were surveying people and asking them about their willingness to pay to restore a meadow.
We found that people were willing to pay more for grassland if they had many types of birds. They were willing to pay more if some of those birds were endangered.
When I think about civil government and the future of the world, people expressing a genuine willingness to pay for things amuses me.
Benji Jones
I understand how this information is useful. At the same time, it’s hard to think of nature’s wonders — anything intangible — in dollars and cents. I am concerned that this approach is demeaning. How do you run it with morality?
Amy Ando
Estimating the dollar value of nature protection is crucial when government policies require cost-benefit analysis. If you don’t have dollar values, those values won’t be calculated. We always try to be clear that this is a quality assumption.
There are other ways to make decisions. You won’t find an environmental economist who says, “No, we should never make decisions without a cost-benefit analysis.” Countries can simply decide that protecting something is non-negotiable.
A few years ago, I worked with a whole team of ecologists on a paper [financial] Working to protect forests and species benefits the world to prevent the next pandemic. Conservation of forests makes the crossover of zoonotic diseases from our species to humans less likely.
It is a huge sum of money. And it talks to the government and it helps persuade people to do something. You can convince some people with a moral story. Other people need to see the dollar value.
