What a living whale is worth – and why the economy should protect nature

Ralph Chami |TED2022| April 2022

一条活蓝鲸值多少钱？比你想象的多得多【TED演讲】_哔哩哔哩_bilibili

In 2017, I confided( to tell someone you trust about personal things that you do not want other people to know) in a dear friend of mine that my lifelong wish was to see the blue whales. Before I knew it, I found myself with a bunch of researchers in the Sea of Cortez（科尔特斯海） studying the blue whales. We used to be in a boat 25 foot long. And next to us … is this majestic（雄伟的，壮丽的） creature feeding gracefully next to us.

Carbon sequestration of the whales system

Now you have to understand, at that point in time, I knew nothing about blue whales, or whales in general. I’m just a financial economist. But I learned something from them, which was really incredible. It was already known in the science that whales capture so much carbon on their body and indirectly. And that’s, of course, very important for us because we are all facing the climate calamity（灾难，祸患） and we are all talking about how to grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Well, it turns out that the whales grab so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – by the way(顺便说, they eat and they poop(拉屎）. Yeah. It’s all about food. So how does the whale system work?

  1. phytoplankton

    Well, it starts in the oceans. There’s these microscopic organisms（生物，有机体) called phytoplankton. (植物，浮游生物）Those phytoplankton do something really incredible. They grab so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and they return oxygen to all of us. Now how much carbon dioxide do they grab from the atmosphere? About 37 gigatons（十亿吨级） of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Truly the lungs of the planet are in the ocean. Now, if you want to visualize what 37 gigatons mean, that’s the equivalent of the carbon that is grabbed by four Amazon forests per year. That’s how much is being sucked in by these photosynthetic（光合作用） organisms.

  2. krill

    Now larger creatures called krill（ small shellfish）, love to eat phytoplankton directly or indirectly. And the whales love to feed on the krill. They feed so much on the krill that they grow bigger and bigger, and they store carbon in their body. How much carbon do they store in their body?

  3. whale

    Roughly about seven to nine tons of carbon on their body. If you want to convert(转换) that to carbon dioxide, that’s about 33 tons of carbon dioxide being kept out of the atmosphere on the body of a single whale. If you want to visualize that, that’s the work of 1,500 trees on the body of a single whale. OK? But those guys, because they eat a lot, what do you do next? You poop a lot. And their poop turns out to be incredibly important because it fertilizes（受精，施肥[to put fertilizer on the soil to make plants grow]） the phyto(一种植物？）. So you have this wonderful cycle. OK? The whale feeds on the krill, the krill feeds on the phyto, and the phyto eats the poop of the whales to get more active. And when the phyto gets more active, it grabs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So just imagine: the whales, they capture carbon on their body. Unfortunately, at some point they die, and they’re so heavy they sink to the bottom of the ocean. And anything below a thousand meters is sequestered(a sequestered place is quiet and far away from people) almost forever. And through their poop they also fertilize phyto, making phyto even more active, grabbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The bad status of the whales

So in a sense, the whales are incredible allies（同盟国） in the fight against climate change. Now that’s good news, right? Yeah. Except that whales are dying. They’re dying from ship strikes. They’re dying from pollution, they’re dying from entanglements(纠缠，铁丝网围栏）. In fact, they’re dying because our current economic system puts a zero value on a living whale. But chop（cut some thing) a whale, sell it for its meat, it acquires a value. The value of a living whale is zero, zero dollars, zero in any currency（货币）.I’m a financial economist. And I’m listening to these scientists bemoaning(complain disappointed about some things) what’s happening to the whales. And I wanted to help. I didn’t know how to help. And I thought, wait a minute. Maybe I can bring your message to the audiences around the world. Maybe I can translate all of that value, those services they do for us in a language that we can all understand.

translate the value

Unfortunately, it’s a language of dollars and cents. So I set out with my team to value the services of a whale but one service – because the whales do a whole host of things. But I just wanted to value one thing, which is what is the value of their carbon sequestration(扣押) service to us?

Now how would you do something like that? After all, the whale is a living system. The whale captures carbon on her body, and she gives birth to baby whales who also grow up to capture carbon on their body. And they give birth to whales and so forth, and indirectly through the fertilization of phyto. So how would you do something like this?

Well, to do that,

I had to resort to what I do best, which is valuation. I looked at it, I said, wait a minute. This looks like a share of stock（股票） that pays dividends（红利）.Except those dividends are live dividends. They give birth to more dividends. So if I were to track the whale over her lifetime and keep track of all these dividends into the future, and then multiply that by the price of carbon, and discount（折价，折现，忽视） that all the way to the present, I can figure out what is the present value, discounted present value, of the lifetime earnings of a single whale. Would you like to know how much?

Would you like to know how much?（重复）

Audience: Yes!

RC: At least three million dollars. At least. Because I’m leaving so much out of this. But I just wanted to tell the good news that I heard on that boat. I didn’t know what to do. I was trying to help them out. But there’s more good news. Would you like to hear it?

Audience: Yes!

Carbon sequestration of the other creatures

  • elephants

RC: Their cousins on land, the elephants in the forests of Africa, in the Congo Basin, （刚果盆地） they do the same thing. Turns out the way they walk and they eat and they poop, they increase carbon sequestration（扣押） in the trees, in the forests between seven and 14 percent. Just imagine, just by frolicking（play happily) around, they’re helping us to grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix it. So I thought, hey, maybe, maybe we can value their services too. Right? Same thing. But again, use the same model of valuation. You follow the same methodology（ the set of methods）, and you discount all of that to the present. And you ask yourself, what is the value of a single elephant’s carbon sequestration service? Would you like to know how much?

Audience: Yes!

RC: Here we go. 2.6 million dollars. Would you like to hear some more good news?

Audience: Yes!

  • forests

RC: Aside from forests – because we are land people, we just think of forests – go a little bit into the water. Sea grass, salt marsh（沼泽） mangroves（红树）, kelp（巨藻） forests, peat（泥炭） lands, wetlands – these are living systems that suck in so much carbon dioxide beyond your imagination, and they keep it forever in their roots as long as you leave them alone and you look after them .So … If you think these numbers are big, wait till you see what I’m about to tell you next. In sea grass alone, sea grass alone, carbon sequestration. How much do you think is the value of the global – If you look at globally the sea grass and you value their carbon sequestration service, how much you think it’s worth? You ready? 2.3 trillion dollars. That’s the size of the German stock market.

Now. What does this tell us? This tells us that a living and thriving（ a thriving company, business etc is very successful，欣欣向荣） nature is not only valuable intrinsically（本质的，内在的）, it’s also financially valuable to us. Question is, what do you do with this? So the science tells us what a wondrous Earth we are on. We can value it in dollars and cents. Question is, what are you going to do with it? Well, guess what? We can build a whole economy around a living and thriving nature, not an extractive（摘录的，片面的） view of nature, but a regenerative view of nature. And that economy –Thank you.

The way to build the economy.

That economy is going to deliver for us sustainable and shared prosperity（兴隆） for all, big and small, all creatures on this planet. It does not have to be I win, you lose. It is a win-win. I’m going to show you how.From there we can build – In order to build that economy, we need three things. We need the science, the accounting, the scientific accounting. What is it that you have? How much of it do you have? Then people like me, financial economists, come around and they say, “What is the value of what you have?” The reason we value it is just to basically translate it into the language that policymakers can understand so they can make decisions. That’s all. It’s a translation. But then the third pillar is very important, which is the legal framing. The legal framing is very important because we need to protect the rights of nature, a living and thriving nature. Three things. Once you do these three things, you can create markets around nature. When I say markets around nature, not an extractive view of nature, but a regenerative view of nature. And I’m going to show you how.

I’m going to show you how. Gabon has 57,000 elephants. If you leave them alone, they can grow to 195,000 elephants. Gabon can sell the carbon offsets of its elephants. Imagine – because those elephants are grabbing carbon in the trees – they can sell the carbon offsets of their elephants. To whom? To us because we’re all enamoured（依恋的，迷恋的） with going carbon zero, carbon negative, carbon neutral（中立的）. And our money will come in to look after these elephants in perpetuity（永久的）. OK? So how much revenue（收入） can Gabon get out of it? One billion dollars a year from allowing these elephants to frolic freely, not be tied to anything, just by leaving them alone. Those elephants, by the way, they walk, they poop, just being, having babies, doing whatever they do, they help carbon sequestration in the forests.

The nature and the economy.

A forest without animals is dead. It’s not about flora（植物群）. It’s about flora and fauna（动物群）. It’s about nature itself. That’s what the message is. Who would buy these carbon offsets? All these companies and countries that made commitments to carbon zero, carbon negative, carbon neutral. They would buy the carbon offsets, or carbon credits if you like. The money would flow in from these ecosystem services – be it the whales, be it the elephants, be it mangrove（红树，一种热带作物）, sea grass, salt marsh – and the money goes in by contract（合同）, using block chain（区块链） technology to look after nature in perpetuity – very important – and to look after the stewards（男服务员，主管） of nature in perpetuity. And the stewards of nature are the local and the indigenous（土生土长的） population. They’re the ones who are doing the conservation（保护工作）, not you and me.

Once we do that – Notice what it is. It’s a win for nature. It’s a win for the economy. The government will make money because the government is going to get all that revenue. It will change its fiscal（财政的） stance. It will diversify its economy. It will grow in a sustainable way. It’s a win for the environment. It’s a win for all of these creatures that have suffered so much at our hands. It’s a win for this beautiful Earth of ours. As Carl Sagan once said, “The only Earth we’ll ever know. The only home we’ll ever know.” It’s a win for us. We are taking this work in Africa to Liberia（利比里亚）, Cameroon（柯麦隆）, Kenya（肯尼亚）, South Africa. We’re taking this work to the Americas, Chile（智利）, Argentina（阿根廷）. We’re doing it in the US and in the UK. Imagine, it just started with just a wish of mine to see a blue whale. Little did I know it’s going to end up with a vision of how we ought to live for tomorrow .

Thank you.

(Applause)