The Value of the Seas

Alanna Mitchell demonstrates in this topical and highly relevant book why I am a fan of science journalists—they take complex scientific works and turn them into understandable material for the public. In Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, Mitchell transports the reader from Australia to the United States, Puerto Rico, England, Panama, Canada, Spain, the People’s Republic of China and Tanzania, using examples to explain the hopes and challenges facing the global ocean as described by the received science.

She begins on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The reef is an Australian National Park that is protected by strictly enforced laws against destructive practices. It is currently unlawful for anyone to undertake commercial activity within one third of it. In addition, non-commercial activities within this protected part of the reef are controlled. Sadly, this effort by Australia to protect marine biodiversity may be unsuccessful because it appears that the biggest threat will come from climate change, which is a global problem and needs global action to reverse. Still, Australia’s protection is likely to make the Great Barrier Reef somewhat resilient to the impacts of climate change.

Mitchell explains three direct effects of climate change on corals. First, the warming of the global ocean may result in the death of the coral’s symbiotic algae; that is, it leads to what is described in the literature as coral bleaching. When the algae die, “their colour disappears and leaves the corals’ flesh ghostly white.” Second, with climate change, it is highly likely that the volume of water in the sea may increase to such an extent that many of the world’s corals will drown. Third, and even more worrying, climate change is modifying the chemistry of the ocean, which can result in devastating consequences, namely the rapid increase in the number of areas without oxygen in the global ocean, which therefore cannot support living creatures.

Mitchell then roams the world on the lookout for vital signs that connote danger in the global ocean. The setting in Chapter 2 is the Gulf of Mexico, where she explains the changes in the oxygen content in recent years. We learn that there are currently 407 dead zones in the global ocean and that there has been a doubling of dead zones each decade since 1960, meaning that there are now 16 times more of them than five decades ago. Dead zones are areas without oxygen where neither fish nor invertebrates can survive. They are caused by changing wind patterns, which alter circulation patterns and nutrients, resulting in low oxygen.

She then moves on to Puerto Rico, where the vital sign she discusses is changes in the pH of water. The pH is a measure of acidity, which is a key characteristic of water. Pure water at room temperature has a pH of seven; a reading of below seven means the water is acidic. Mitchell notes that ocean creatures are extremely sensitive to pH. A key characteristic of water is that its pH is hard to change. Its level depends on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The pH of ocean water is changing at a rate never seen before. In fact, scientists calculate that the ocean’s pH could fall by 0.7 of a unit if humans continue burning fossil fuels at the rate of recent decades.

Metabolism and the fate of plankton are the vital signs Mitchell concentrates on next and the setting for the discussion here is Plymouth in England. Plankton are a group of tiny organisms that are considered the “lynchpin on which life itself depends.” Mitchell went to Plymouth because she has come to consider it “Plankton Central”—one of the few places on the planet where scientists spend their time studying plankton, which is quite surprising given the significance of these organisms to life on earth. Scientists there are finding that plankton seem to be in trouble, and that the likely reason is increasing acidity of ocean water due, once again, to increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Another vital sign Mitchell looks at is changes in fecundity, coral fecundity to be precise, but in Panama this time, not Australia. Coral spawn in an amazing way, preparing all year for the one night of spawning, when they release billions of eggs and sperm into the wide ocean. It is estimated, according to Mitchell, that “20 per cent of the world’s reefs have already been destroyed and another 50 per cent are in trouble.”

The fate of fish in the global ocean is obviously a vital sign and, not surprisingly, Halifax is where Mitchell goes to examine this problem. The collapse of the northern cod stocks off Newfoundland is well known to many around the world. The story of global fisheries is one of overcapacity, overfishing, depletion of fish stocks and ocean-bottom destruction driven, to a large extent, by fisheries subsidies given by governments around the world. These subsidies are estimated at between US$30 billion and US$34 billion annually, for an industry with estimated gross revenues of US$80 billion a year.

Then Mitchell turns her attention to China, which is a superpower when it comes to fisheries, catching more than 10 percent of the total global fish catch. China has a huge appetite for seafood, a large population and, increasingly, the income to demand fish in vast quantities from all over the world. At the same time, China’s rapid economic growth and prosperity have already catapulted the country to the top of the league of greenhouse gas emitters in the world, surpassing even the United States. These developments in China have huge negative consequences for the global ocean.

For the last of her vital signs, the setting Mitchell chooses is Zanzibar in Africa, where she goes looking for adaptability to the problems of the global ocean. And she finds it in the form of low-tech, low-environmental-impact and people-oriented aquaculture, which shows the way for the future. Mitchell searches for hope in the Dry Tortugas south of Florida, a trip below the ocean surface “aimed at trying to understand, for a few hours, what it was like to be deep inside the ocean womb, where the human hand had not yet touched.” The hope comes from knowing that biology is at work all the time. “It is flexible, adaptable … It can always surprise us, can always do the unexpected.”

As an economist, I cannot help but recast Alanna Mitchell’s refreshing and easily readable story in terms of values, values as economists view them. The “global ocean in crisis” is actually about the values we derive from and attach to the global ocean. Values are used here in a broad sense including both use and non-use values. A comprehensive valuation of the global ocean and the habitats it contains has to include 1) direct-use value, 2) indirect-use value, 3) option value, 4) existence value and 5) bequest value.

Direct-use values may be generated through the consumptive or non-consumptive use of ocean resources, such as food fish and whale watching. On the other hand, many ocean services are used as intermediate inputs to the production of goods and services to humans, and therefore are said to have indirect-use value. Examples of such services are water cycling, waste assimilation and other services leading to clean air and water, and thus reduced health risks. Even if some people do not currently derive any utility from the global ocean, it may still hold what is termed option value. That is the potential that the global ocean will provide currently unknown valuable goods and services in the future. Many species of ocean life have yet to be identified, let alone evaluated economically. Even well-known species can possess characteristics that have future use or non-use values. A few decades ago, black cod off the northern Pacific was considered trash because no one would eat it. This fish has since evolved into a big export commodity for British Columbia and some U.S. states. There is also what is denoted in the economic literature as existence value. This is the value conferred by humans on the ecosystem regardless of its use value. An environmental good may be valuable merely because one is happy that it exists, quite apart from any future option to consume it, visit it or otherwise use it. This value may arise from aesthetic, ethical, moral or religious considerations. Finally, we have bequest value, which is a value that is captured by the willingness to pay to preserve a resource for the benefit of future generations.

Alanna Mitchell identifies a number of ocean services that are central to our survival on this planet. She makes this startling statement: “The global ocean makes up 99 per cent of the living space on the planet.” This is a powerful way of helping people understand the importance of the global ocean to living things on earth (or is it in the ocean?). Until now, the most cited number on the relationship between land and water is that the ocean is 70 percent of the total surface area of the planet. Couple these statistics with the fact that many scientists believe that life forms on land depend on the life and chemistry in the ocean, and the answer to the question of what will humanity lose if the global ocean is rendered dysfunctional becomes very scary.

Other important services, or values, highlighted by Mitchell are that plankton produce half of the oxygen we breathe in, making these microscopic creatures the “real lungs of our planet”; that the ocean performs a control function with regard to “oxygen cycles of the planet, as well as other chemical systems that give all living creatures life—including us”; that it “provides important services to humanity, such as protection from floods, removing the toxins from waste and serving up food”; and last, but definitely not least, that every third molecule of carbon dioxide we exhale is absorbed into the ocean. The question for the economically savvy is this: what would it cost humanity to abate all the greenhouse gas that is currently absorbed by the global ocean for free?

A key thesis of Sea Sick is that as we humans remove different life forms in the global ocean’s food web and change its chemistry, we weaken the ability of the global ocean to provide all these services, thereby putting the values we derive from the global ocean in peril. But why would an apparently intelligent species such as humans undermine itself in this manner? Mitchell poses this question when she says, “In terms of pure self-interest, this is a problem. If we depend on corals, algae, plankton and millions of other species, and if we are killing them off, how will we survive?”

I would argue that this is happening because of the way we value the different resources and services that the global ocean provides, both spatially and temporally. It is about how individuals and society value the present and the future, how we value here and there, and how we value market and non-market worth. Unfortunately, when it comes to valuation, our egos stand in the way, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Egoism is the law of perspectives as it applies to feelings, according to which what is closest to us appears to be large and weighty, while size and weight decrease with our distance from things.” For most of us, the global ocean is simply too far away from our daily lives. This is the underlying reason for all the problems Mitchell identifies.

The implication of this egoism is that generally, individuals, industry and even governments fail to recognize that the oceans are worth much more than the commercial value (market value) of the saleable products they contain. As Mitchell says, “We haven’t learned how to take the long view,” leading to decisions that focus unwisely on extracting short-term market benefits from the global ocean without due regard for indirect and long-term benefits.

Currently, most economic analysis concentrates on the market value of the products (e.g., fish) caught and sold from the ocean. In a recent paper, I surveyed more than 4,300 articles published from 1994 to 2003 in nine leading environmental and resource economics journals to determine the relative emphasis given to market and non-market values. I found that 99 percent of the papers surveyed mentioned only market values. This is clearly a misallocation of research talent: What is the cost to humans of losing every “second breath”? How much will we be willing to pay to replace the current controlling function of the climate and temperature or the carbon and oxygen cycles? These and many related questions are yet to be adequately addressed by mainstream economists. Losing every second breath, for example, would be like losing 50 percent of the world’s gross global product, a figure in the trillions of dollars ever year.

Sea Sick is well written. Still, I would have loved to see more practical suggestions on the way forward in the epilogue. Here, Mitchell decided to use the space available to her to call for the collective wisdom of humanity in dealing with the problems so vividly described in her book. In addition to this, it would have been useful to provide some practical take-home solutions to the international community and leaders (global problems demand global binding solutions), to national governments (stop providing subsidies that only go to harm the environment and undermine our common future), to the private sector (pledge to be environmentally and socially responsible citizens of the world) and to the public (demand that politicians and corporate leaders put in place institutions, structures and policies, both market and non-market, to tackle the problems facing the global ocean).

Alanna Mitchell has brilliantly argued the case that the sustainability of the global ocean is vital to life on the planet, and that the current and projected picture of the global ocean is not pretty. In economic terms, it is clear that humanity derives a whole range of benefits from the global ocean, which we put in danger at our own peril.