Talk:Economics of biodiversity

This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Economics Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Economics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Economics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.EconomicsWikipedia:WikiProject EconomicsTemplate:WikiProject EconomicsEconomics articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. Ecology Mid‑importance This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Ecology, an effort to create, expand, organize, and improve ecology-related articles.EcologyWikipedia:WikiProject EcologyTemplate:WikiProject EcologyEcology articles Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale. Environment Mid‑importance This environment-related article is part of the WikiProject Environment to improve Wikipedia's coverage of the environment. The aim is to write neutral and well-referenced articles on environment-related topics, as well as to ensure that environment articles are properly categorized. Read Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ and leave any messages at the project talk page.EnvironmentWikipedia:WikiProject EnvironmentTemplate:WikiProject EnvironmentEnvironment articles Mid This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

I see no reason to merge this article with Bioeconomics since it is hard to find any linkage. Bioeconomics was developed from fisheries economics in the 1950ies and a couple of seminal articles by Canadian economists could be mentioned. Biodiversity is a quite new term and the economics of biodiversity fairly unknown and quite vague. Will ‘Economics of biodiversity’ be within the area of economic theories in fifty years from now? ----Arnejohs 13:25, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. A lot of my work is in ecological/environmental/natural resource economics, and the economics of biodiversity is definitely its own thing that poses some unique and important problems. Here's a link to the famous Dasgupta review on the economics of biodiversity (PDF link):

The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/602e92b2e90e07660f807b47/The_Economics_of_Biodiversity_The_Dasgupta_Review_Full_Report.pdf

And just one example of a study published in a well-regarded environmental economics journal discussing that review (there are plenty of others):

Groom, B., & Turk, Z. (2021). Reflections on the Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity. Environmental and Resource Economics, 79(1), 1-23. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-021-00560-2

So I think Arnejohs is right--biodiversity as a topic/subfield within economics will likely only become more prominent and well-developed in the coming years/decades. So while the article can definitely be improved, the topic also definitely deserves its own article in my opinion. Themrbeaumont (talk) 10:37, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all, I have made some substantial changes to this article and expanded it. The majority of the article was previously unreferenced and much of it did not link to economic contributions explicitly. I have changed all of the sections to include referenced statistics and information. The article now contains sections (names have been changed) on Agriculture and food, Medicine, Industry, Tourism and recreation, Illegal wildlife trade (added), and Impact of economic activity on biodiversity (added).

If anyone could contribute with further improvement and with regard to economic discourse on the premise and means of valuing biodiversity economically that would be helpful, as well as any further information that exemplifies the contribution of biodiversity to the economy.

Manxshearwater (talk) 14:09, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I unfortunately don't have time to contribute right now but work in a related area, and just wanted to say you've done a nice job improving the article Manxshearwater.

Just an idea: to structure the article it might be helpful to introduce some frameworks that are often invoked when we're talking about economically (thought not necessarily financially) valuing biodiversity, like ecosystem services (which the article already references, but doesn't use as an organizing idea) or the CICES classification (https://cices.eu/).

The reason we use frameworks like those has to do with the idea of total economic value in the context of ecological/environmental/natural resource economics: typically, markets are only good at capturing use value, and even then not always (see market failure). Biodiversity doesn't necessarily create economic value by producing a commodity (though it can!), but instead by providing regulating services that benefit a range of other systems and processes that are economically important, many of which you've mentioned in the article.

Currently the article points to the Dasgupta Review as an external link, but that could be a really nice starting point for trying to pull the current article together (there is a lot of ongoing scholarship that directly refers to that review).

Just a few quick ideas in case they're helpful for someone with a bit more time!

edit: PS By chance just came across a nice paper on this topic by an economics prof at Yale with training in ecology: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39141347/

Themrbeaumont (talk) 11:03, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]