Natural resources found to be priceless

Value put on natural resources shows they are truly priceless.

Magazine gift subscriptions - from just £14.99 every 6 issues. Christmas cheer delivered all year!

James Fair

Published: December 8, 2015 at 8:01 am

Polar bears are worth $6.3bn a year, beavers up to $1bn, sharks $944m, dung beetles $380m and Corbett Tiger Reserve $235m – according to a study compiled by BBC Earth and environmentalist Tony Juniper in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The research then compared the value of these ‘natural resources’ with the annual Gross Domestic Product of countries or the yearly value of resources such as fossil fuels.

The UK, in comparison, is worth $2.55tn (that’s about 400 times more than polar bears), while the restaurants in the USA are valued at $709bn – about 700 times more than beavers.

The most valuable resource of all was fresh water – worth a monumental $73.5tn every year – while trees came second at $16.2tn and coral reefs third at $9.9tn. Oil, in comparison, is worth a paltry $3.33tn.

Wildlife journalist

James Fair writes about wildlife conservation and broader environmental issues for a wide range of publications, including BBC Wildlife and BBC Countryfile magazines. James started his career as a journalist in the early 1990s, then spent a number of years working on conservation projects in South America, including an ultimately doomed effort to reintroduce an orphaned Andean bear cub into the wild in Bolivia. In 1999, James joined BBC Wildlife as a commissioning editor, while later filling the roles of staff writer, environment editor and keyboard destroyer-in-chief. In 2018, he went freelance, and now takes on a range of news, feature and report writing assignments, and is also the editor of the membership magazine of the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES). In 2019, he published his second book, 100 Great Wildlife Experiences: What to see and where.

Dung beetles are worth en estimated $380m.

© Nature Picture Library/Getty