Dow Jones, GDP, environment metric

 

Dow Jones, GDP, environment metric

Eddie Game is the conservation planning specialist with the Conservancy's Methods and Tools team. He works across the organization, trying to improve approaches to conservation prioritization and decision making. In particular, he is working to develop planning approaches better able to incorporate a range of socioeconomic data and considerations, ecosystem services, risk, and climate change adaptation.

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"Agreeing on one metric will require enormous cooperation amongst conservation groups, as well as a good dose of humility and altruism."

—Eddie Game, conservation planning specialist at the Conservancy

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Dow Jones, GDP, environment metric

By Eddie Game

They are familiar terms to most ears — "GDP" and "Dow Jones". And the idea behind them could be the next big idea to make environmental health a household concept.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a globally common metric for a country's economic health. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is a more specific metric of the United States' financial health, but there are equivalents in all major regions of the world.

Most of us don't know how these metrics are calculated — but we appreciate their importance nonetheless. When they decline, we get concerned, even if we are not directly affected. As we have seen over the past few months, this public awareness generates enormous pressure to act when things go badly.

Unfortunately, the environment has no such public metric of health — and, as a consequence, no such public accountability.

We need a Dow Jones average for the environment.

The great strength of these economic metrics is not their accuracy, but their simplicity and their accessibility. We read them in the paper, they are graphed on the news, and when you look up any country on Wikipedia, one of the first statistics you see is GDP.

Yes, the health of natural environments is complex. No one metric is likely to accurately capture all components. But the same is true of economies. Of the more than 17,000 publically listed companies in the United States, the Dow Jones is based on the performance of only 30.

As conservationists, we need to find our 30 companies.

The challenge will be to decide what pieces of the planet's ecosystems should contribute to these metrics: river flow, land clearing, invasive species, marine pollution?

The same metric will not make sense for all countries (marine pollution in Mongolia?), but I'm also sure there will be many commonalities. The final selection must be based on a combination of what ecologists deem important and what the public cares about.

Agreeing on one metric will require enormous cooperation amongst conservation groups, as well as a good dose of humility and altruism. Many of the species and ecosystems we have dedicated our lives to will not make it on the list. We have to be big enough to accept this. We must hope that a well-constructed environmental average will point to their health also, and we must trust they will not be forgotten when the time comes to act.

Large non-governmental organizations such as The Nature Conservancy will play a crucial role in developing, generating support for, and maintaining the independence of environmental health metrics.

I wonder if governments would reassess spending priorities if their environmental average could be judged by everyone who visits Wikipedia or listens to the news?

(March 2009)

Photo credits (top to bottom, left to right): © Dow Jones Industrial Average (Wikipedia Commons); photo courtesy of Eddie Game