Environmental Learning Center

Ecosystems contribute environmental goods and services to our economy. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services. These goods and services include: clean air, clean drinking water, and decomposition of wastes.

Our economy depends upon these factors just as it depends upon fossil fuels, capital investment and labor. In fact, if we want a strong economy, it makes economic sense to protect the ecosystems that provide these valuable goods and services. Can you imagine if we had to produce clean air, buy our shady areas, or pay for the decomposition of plant and animal waste?

The recently completed Millennium Ecosystem Assessment sponsored by the United Nations, made the first global assessment of how loss of ecosystem services adversely affects human well-being, and how poorly our economic markets take such costs into account.

For example, an analysis of forests documented that the "market value" of timber and fuel account for only one-third of the total economic value of the forest, with the balance being ecosystem services. When the loss of these goods and services is considered, many nations commonly considered to be growing in wealth are actually getting poorer.

The Indian River Lagoon provides us with the following ecosystem services:

• Maintenance of biodiversity

• Protection of coastal shores

• Nutrient dispersal and cycling

• Purification of water

• Cultural, intellectual and spiritual inspiration

• Recreational experiences

• Scientific discovery

And of course, healthy ecosystems do contribute cold, hard cash to our economies as well.

Seagrasses are the basis for an annual $54.5 million commercial fishing and shell fishing industry in the Indian River Lagoon. More than $54 million was spent on recreational fishing in the lagoon in 1990, and current estimates say that $87 million will be spent on fishing by 2010. In 1995, the net economic value of the Indian River Lagoon was valued at $730 million; certainly the forthcoming research about today’s net value of the lagoon will be significantly more substantial.

But more than that cold, hard cash, those ecosystem services provided by the Indian River Lagoon are priceless. Some things in the Indian River Lagoon region, money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s the Indian River Lagoon.