DAN ILIC: Some of the best things in life are free. Fresh air. A swim at the beach. A walk through the bush. But what if you had to start thinking about that tree you just walk past differently? Not just as a beautiful part of nature, but as a ‘service provider’? 

After all, that tree does a lot of work. It provides shade, prevents soil erosion, absorbs carbon, and produces oxygen. It's a habitat for birds and walking past it and smelling its earthiness makes us feel good. 

But if you had to put a price tag on all of that, could you? 

VOX POP 1: That’s a hard question. 

VOX POP 2: What? Money wise? 

VOX POP 3: Mega millions. You couldn’t put a price on it. 

VOX POP 4: I’d spend an awful lot to keep it.  

VOX POP 5: You can’t put a price on a good tree, can you? 

DAN ILIC: I'm Dan Ilic and this is Preppers, a podcast which asks the question: are we getting ready hard and fast enough for the climate changes that are coming? In this episode, we'll take a look at how the profit motives of capitalism, are being mashed together with the environment-first principles of ecological economics.  

Can putting a price on nature help us prepare for climate change? 

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: I mean, ecological economics is trying to make the best of a bad situation. 

DAN ILIC: This is Doctor Miri Raven. 
 
MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: I am Noongar and culturally Namadgi person from the southwest of Western Australia on my mother's side and on my father's side, I'm from Aotearoa, New Zealand. 

DAN ILIC: Miri is a geographer and part of the Policy Research Center and the Environment and Society Group at UNSW. 

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: Ecological economics was a term that I came across in the 90s and it was a way to try and figure out how to make sure that we could factor in the environment when we're looking at demand, supply and exchange. And I thought it was amazing. And I still think the idea is good. I think the application of it is difficult. 

DAN ILIC: It was the early 1970s when economists started formally recognising that we might feel less inclined to exploit and damage the natural world if it had a monetary value. To this end, they started using the term ‘natural capital’. This could refer to anything from soil, to water, to air, to biodiversity - anything in nature that provided value or an ‘ecoysystem service’ to us humans. But giving the world some new vocabulary did not resolve the difficulty of asking the market to value the things it had always taken for granted.   

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: I mean, I guess a simplistic way is saying like, how can that little coin or that piece of plastic money equate to a tree?  

Like that's the abstractness of it. And there's a lot of abstraction that takes place trying to create a value. What like, what is the system for working out what the value is? So there's things called contingent valuation and cost benefit analysis. 

And some of those are asking like ‘What are you willing to give up in the future to have it now?’ or ‘What are you willing to pay?’, which is the user pays model. But we all have different values and we all value in different ways. 

Some people don't actually believe that we have spirits so that there's a spiritual realm. And so yeah, I call it a tree, but like it's my uncle, it's my father, it's my mother. 

Everything is a relationship somehow, and we can distance it by giving it a name, like an object or a tree, or we can bring it closer by calling it a relative and interacting or relating it with it with them as though they are our relatives. We're looking at the same thing, but seeing different things. 

DAN ILIC: One of the other difficulties of putting a price on nature is how we consider time. If you've ever watched the stock market, you'll understand that our economy is driven by the cost of stuff right now. But nature's value is as much about the future as it is about today. 

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: So what's the value of keeping an old growth forest in 100 years time compared to the present? 

So in economics, there's this thing called the discount rate, and usually the future's worth less than the present - which is kind of counterintuitive when you start thinking about things like climate change, which is a bigger time scale. Or you think about, you know, our children and the future generations. Just - there's bits that I'm not quite sure how we're going to manage. 

Economics doesn't sit outside of a political system and we like to think that it does. but the actual practicalities of working across the political spectrum to convince people that we need to breathe in the future, we need to be able to be outside at the beaches. I think any system that needs to try and incorporate something that has been outside of it for so long is going to struggle. 

DAN ILIC: Someone who's watching that struggle very closely is Dr Megan Evans. 

MEGAN EVANS: Environmental protection is just the latest in a long list of social problems that have been marketised. So, you know, look at disability services and other social and health services - you know sometimes markets can work well but a lot of the times in these kind of more public good, environmental, social issues, there are challenges that emerge 

DAN ILIC: Megan is a researcher and senior lecturer at the UNSW School of Business in Canberra and she spends her time looking at how environmental markets work and how economic policies operate in the real world. 

MEGAN EVANS:  With environmental markets, the idea is that markets are the best tool to solve various policy problems. And that the problem of environmental degradation and environmental destruction at the hands of our societies at the moment has been constructed as a finance problem - as a problem of: there is not enough money at the moment held by governments, held by the public to effectively protect and manage our environment. Therefore, in order to get more money in to solve these problems, we need to access private finance, because that is where the money is. It's in private hands. And in order to get engage with private investors, financiers, corporations, etc we need to make environmental protection and conservation of biodiversity essentially profitable. It needs to be a money-making exercise. 

DAN ILIC: If you've ever come across a politician saying something like “We need replicable, scalable, regulative, investment ready conservation programs – we need shovel ready projects” they are very likely talking about the commodification of the environment.  

MEGAN EVANS: once you scratch the surface the logic that it’s a finance problem starts to fall apart a little bit. Characterising it as a finance problem depoliticises it and kind of obscures the fact that it’s actually just a choice to not invest public money into a public good – because, you know, we’re spending 12 billion a year subsiding the expansion of coal and gas mines.   

So there’s been a debate called the Conservation Triage Problem. One side is saying ‘It's just good decision making to use dollars and cents’. The other side is saying ‘Be very careful with how that language can normalize weighing up what could be perceived by many parts of our community as priceless environmental assets, as just any other kind of commodity or asset’. 

And once you kind of start going down that road it's difficult to pull back from. You know, we're now in a situation where environmental markets are pretty much the only tool that you can use to address environmental loss. 

DAN ILIC: You've probably heard of offsets and carbon credits. This is where the environmental market's rubber really starts to hit the road. Or the dollars start to hit bank accounts. 

Since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 - which legally bound Parties from developed countries to emission reduction targets - governments have been trying to come up with ways to cut emissions. In Australia, the Emissions Reduction Fund has become the main mechanism. 

Your reward, should you reduce greenhouse gas emissions, remove them from the atmosphere or avoid emitting in the first place, is an Australian Carbon Credit Unit or ACCU. One tonne of carbon equals one ACCU. You can think of an ACCU kind of like cryptocurrency. It's a representation of money that can be exchanged and traded. Its value can change with the supply and demand of the market. 

Right now, one ACCU is worth $32.25. But it's the government that decides how many ACCUs there are banging around.  

A carbon credit can be sold back to the government or to another business who wants to emit more carbon than their emissions cap allows. This purchase of ACCUs by businesses exceeding their emissions cap is called ‘offsetting’.  

There are a whole bunch of things you can do to earn ACCUs: 

You might recycle your industrial waste instead of taking it to landfill. 

You could change the diet of your cattle so they don't emit as much methane. 

Or you could build a carbon capture facility next to your power station and inject your emissions into a hole in the ground. That one is particularly expensive and not without controversy. 

But one of the better known and most popular ways to earn carbon credits is via ‘vegetation’. In short, planting trees - or the most common method; changing land use so that instead of, say, cattle stomping around and killing everything, trees are allowed to grow as they otherwise would have. 

For any of these activities, all you have to do is follow the method set out by the government and cha-ching - carbon credits baby!  One of the jobs of the Clean Energy Regulator is to determine how carbon credits can be earned, and the methodologies you have to follow to earn them. 

But, not everyone follows the rules and lately the scheme has run into quite a bit of criticism.  In 2022, Professor Andrew Macintosh, who used to chair the committee overseeing the scheme, called it a ‘fraud’.  Macintosh’s research, which Megan has co-authored, suggests that 70-80% of projects do not represent real and additional abatement – that millions of ACCUs worth millions of dollars have been awarded for things like growing trees that are already there.  

The Clean Energy Regulator has refuted this research and an independent review of the ACCU Scheme delivered in January 2023, found it to be “essentially sound”.  

Meanwhile,  ACCUs continues to roll out all over the country.  

WILLIAM GLAMORE: It’s a very complicated system that is evolving quickly. 

DAN ILIC: William Glamore is a professor and Principal Research Fellow in the UNSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and he's been helping the Clean Energy Regulator come up with a new methodology for the ACCU scheme. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: Those methods go through a really strict review process. And if you follow that method you can generate a carbon credit. 

DAN ILIC: When it comes to capturing carbon, not all ecosystems are created equal. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: It's really about mangroves and saltmarsh. They actually store more carbon than most other ecosystems. And so they become really big carbon sinks. And that's this term now called blue carbon. 

DAN ILIC: These blue carbon ecosystems like saltmarsh, mangroves or seagrass, are not just special because they can store more carbon than, say, a rainforest, but they can also do it around 40 times faster. With stats like that, you'd think blue carbon would have been a front runner in the carbon credit game. But until 2022, it wasn't on the list. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: So I was at the university, got a phone call and the Clean Energy Regulator has decided that they want to create a method for blue carbon, which meant that the accumulation of carbon on these sites would become regulated in a way that people would generate carbon credits from them. 

DAN ILIC: By the time the Clean Energy Regulator caught up with Will, he'd been busy restoring blue carbon ecosystems with whatever funding he could scrape together for nearly 20 years. Back when he began his work, they were still just called wetlands, and the east coast of Australia didn't have that many left intact. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: In colonising this country, there was this process of let's drain all the floodplains. Let's farm it. Because that's what we did in England. And then we drained it with initially fairly innocuous small drains that didn't do that much damage. 

DAN ILIC: Fast forward through the Industrial Revolution to the postwar boom, and the draining of coastal wetlands really took off. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: So this idea was, let's drain it, and we will be able to expand farming and the whole country will keep growing. But by the time we got to the 60s and 70s we were really overreaching - and we went into all the really, really low lying land that probably never should have been drained. So if I pull away that drain and lift up that floodgate, the tide will come and go overland because that that's how low that land is. And in fact, a lot of it has become even lower because once you drain it, it all subsides. So it was this real diabolical sort of, roller coaster snowball that just took off. 

DAN ILIC: In order to turn wetlands into farmland, huge drainage trenches were dug across these landscapes, and flood gates were built up and down river systems to stop the tidal flows, cutting the rivers off from the wetlands. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: But that process then led to the lowering of the groundwater table in the wetlands – the removing of the water from the system. And so Australia is blessed with a huge amount of what we call acid sulphate soils. And that led all that sulphides to become sulfuric acid. And so we've got millions and millions of hectares of sulfuric acid. 

DAN ILIC:  And the bad news doesn't stop there, because all that sulfuric acid then strips the metals from the soil, leaching them into the water. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: So then you have things like arsenic and cadmium and manganese and aluminium and iron all being stripped from the ground, and now being what we call ‘mobilised’, so brought into the fresh water. And then being added to the drains - all these little drains every single day, every single tide. 

Because the farmers are doing ok – but the water coming off the farm was killing not just the area in the drain but the moving into the entirety of the estuary and having a big impact.  

DAN ILIC: So it's the early 90s. Thousands of hectares of farmland are cut across with these drainage trenches full of contaminated, acidic, black water. The cows on that farmland drink the water and lo and behold, you have a very sick and not terribly productive herd of dairy cows - at which point you bring in a young engineer called Will.  

WILLIAM GLAMORE: The question was, can we fix it? And my approach was, those little floodgates are blocking the natural process. So what if we pull those floodgates out and let the tide back in? Will that solve it? And the challenge was how do we do this in a way that still let’s the farmers farm? Cause they didn’t want to give up their land and that was a real back and forth challenge for many years and we developed all these fancy bits of machinery tha would just let in enough water that it would fix the water quality issue, but not go over land. 

And then from doing that we learned how to do this at bigger scales across larger areas, and how we could sort of use nature to restore nature.  

And it works. And the beauty of the world that I work in, which is the tidal world - the estuaries and the tides, is that it happens quickly. So if I pull the gates off today, you will see immediate response tomorrow. And, you know, the fish might come back in the next day. And the water quality improves really quickly. Even the bigger response, like the, mangroves and the salt marsh that we're talking about, they come in also pretty quickly. So in three and five years you can see a massive change from an acidic, scalded, horrible environment that is providing no services to anyone and in fact poisons everything in the area to a beautiful wetland.  

DAN ILIC:  It’s easy to see why the introduction of blue carbon to the ACCU scheme carries such significance for someone like Will. Suddenly, after all these years there’s an incentive for farmers to engage in the restoration of their land. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: As someone who's been running around restoring wetlands my whole life, we've always put a price on it. How much it's going to take to restore? 

And we've never been able to effectively do that at scale on private land holdings. Because the only thing we can say to the land holders is, ‘Your land is really bad, wouldn't it be a nice thing to do to make it better?’ And I understand these farmers are making a living. 

And we're never going to get the scale or the urgency we need to anywhere deal with the problem unless there's a market approach. You know, we were hoping to restore maybe, as my group we might get 10,000 hectares by 2030. Now, I don't see why the market wouldn’t restore all of them. There's incentive to do so. 

So we need to look into the future and say, well, if I've got a property right now and it's barely productive as it is, how do I manage this land into the future? 

DAN ILIC: One of the things the future has in store for these low-lying tracts of coastal land is sea level rise. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: So we're talking half a meter in the next 30, 40 years, more than a meter in the next 100 years - that land is going to be increasingly less productive and eventually not productive at all. And you can make the levees higher and higher and higher. But that's not going to solve the low-lying land behind it. 

 So the method says, okay, one idea is you can restore it and create mangroves in saltmarsh where currently there's pasture, sugar cane and get paid for that. 

There is a market now and in 2022 that was launched and a number of state and federal governments went and said, but what we need is some really good pilot projects to show how this process can roll out. And The Blue Heart is one of those. 

DAN ILIC: The Blue Heart is an area of just over 5000 hectares of Maroochy River floodplain in the southeast corner of Queensland. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: There was sugarcane in these areas. The mill that processed that sugarcane went under. And when that mill went under the local sugar cane producers found it very, very challenging, to then have a product that they could bring to market, economically. 

So here we have a large area of really low-lying land that is no longer viable in the same way it was before. And on top of that, southeast Queensland has this huge growth pressures. And so they're managing more and more people in a finite space. And they get very big floods. 

And we know that this area that was sugarcane, can actually hold a lot of flood water as well. So council had the opportunity of saying ‘Let's come in and try to help the landholders by buying them out and allowing that land to be converted to flood accessible land. And let's work together to plan how we would restore that land and do it in a way that follows the method that it would then register for blue carbon and allow return on investment, or at least a generation of ACCUs.’  

It will be, as far as I know, the very first blue carbon project in the country.  

DAN ILIC:  If the Blue Heart project is approved, the ACCU scheme will award credits for carbon sequestration. But restoring coastal wetlands turns out to be about a whole lot more – including preparing these areas for the effects that climate change will bring.  

Since 1880 the global mean sea level has risen by around 24cms and the rate is accelerating. High intensity rainfall events are also predicted to increase. So the work of converting these farmlands into catchment areas for floodwater and higher tidal flows could help protect nearby urban areas as we move into the future.  

For Will, all of these benefit should have a value – and the market shouldn’t stop at just pricing carbon.  

WILLIAM GLAMORE: When we restore system we're also making biodiversity and flood retention and reducing erosion. And there's a long list. Now those things provide value. So the idea is how do we account for that? 

So we're putting things together and saying how much flood benefit are you going to generate from doing so? And let's put a number to that. Erosion in Queensland is a huge issue. By letting mangroves to form we're going to reduce erosion. 

So we're going to get an account that says: this is how much erosion in dollar terms we've been able to reduce. And the list goes on – there's quite a few across this area. But you've got to go through and say ‘biodiversity’ would be one. But what's biodiversity and how do you put an account for that? 

DAN ILIC: An environmental account quite literally takes the form of a spreadsheet with lists of assets, benefits, costs - it’s a system that was accredited by the UN in 2021 and is in the process of being rolled out around the world, with ecosystems from Fiji to Indonesia to Iceland having accounts created for them.  

Here in Australia the first National Ocean Ecosystem Account was published in 2022 and research is underway to create accounts for a range of ecosystems including the Murray Darling Basin, the Mitchell Catchment and critically endangered Box Gum Grassy Woodlands. 

These accounts are simply a tool, and can be applied in lot of different ways. But their underlying purpose is to track an ecosystem, and how it interacts with the economy over time, providing information to decision makers.  

Will’s vision is that, by developing an environmental account – literally listing the benefits, costs, savings, environmental assets of blue carbon ecosystems  – will not only allow each project to be closely monitored over time, but  that these benefits could eventually expand into a submarket, with the potential of putting a price tag on all the co-benefits of ecosystem restoration.  

WILLIAM GLAMORE: Then you go, ‘Well, I'm going to make a wetland and I'm going to sell it potentially for the biodiversity of it. And that's going to get me the best return on this land’, or ‘I'll sell biodiversity with a bit of carbon on top’. And that's the process we're trying to work through right now of how you do that. And that's where this environmental accounting really shines through. 

DAN ILIC: As is often the case with new things, Will knows there will be pitfalls – but this is no reason not to try. 

WILLIAM GLAMORE: We think the bigger process of doing this and creating value for nature is worthwhile getting through some of these, you know, hurdles and stumbles and there will be cowboys and we've got to manage that. One bad operator doesn't mean the whole system's failed. It is really early days and we're trying to do it properly. 

DAN ILIC:  The Blue Carbon Guidelines Will is working on with a team of other academics require that the account document Indigenous cultural value, and be developed in close consultation with Indigenous communities.  They acknowledge that it isn’t easy, or in some cases even possible, to measure what is considered in Indigenous terms, to be unmeasurable – and that attributing economic value to the cultural knowledge, sacred sites or losses that have already occurred due to colonisation can’t be done. But this process aims to help document links to landscape, heritage and identity and help all involved better understand and care for country.  

Miri Raven agrees that ecological economics cannot work without the inclusion of Indigenous people.  

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: I think the light bulbs coming on. I think people have been thinking, ‘Yeah, we'll just take Indigenous knowledge and put it in and it'll be fine’. It's like, well, no, it's not, because Indigenous knowledge is not just about a piece of data, it's a technique, it's about how to do things as well. And you can’t put all of that in a database.  

Indigenous knowledge, it's something that's attached to indigenous peoples. Well, at least it ought to be... and incorporating indigenous knowledge into ecological economics or into any kind of economic or political system necessitates bringing Indigenous people along and in. 

And we cannot just do that for the environment. We have to also do it for people who are not divorced from the environment. And so we can't have a system that excludes indigenous people but includes the environment. It's irrational. 

DAN ILIC:  While blue carbon is a step in the right direction, there are many areas of pristine nature that don’t qualify for schemes like carbon credits. And while an old growth tree in the forests of Tasmania is considered more valuable as toilet paper than as an untouched piece of biodiversity, we have a bit of a problem. Here’s Megan Evans.  

MEGAN EVANS:  I think there is very much a perception that, the only option we have left is to use this financial or market approach even the prospect of success is low. 

I heard someone say exactly this recently, where they freely admitted that this idea of natural capital and environment markets doesn't make sense, but that we shouldn't let the prospect of certain failure stop us from trying. Because in the meantime, while we're trying, while we're failing forward with these markets, as some scholars have said, then that will buy us time for technology to improve and then that will save us. And if that isn't an indication of fantasy and cognitive dissonance and faith, then I don't think those kinds of people can at the same time criticize the concept of degrowth. It's very taboo to talk about and it's very easy to characterise anyone who talks about this idea as offered the fairies or, you know, unrealistic or unreasonable or not very pragmatic. 

But I think we need more discussion of you know, radical alternatives because I would rather go with a radical alternative that might have slightly more prospect of working, than something that even some advocates of environmental markets admit that there is a certain failure, that they're not going to work! 

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: In order to put environmental systems first, we need to be mindful about where we sit. Like it's as simple as that. We need to just sit down - and there's a concept from the north, from a group of indigenous peoples – it's called dadirri – it's deep listening. We really just do need to sit and we need to listen. I'm not saying we don't need to be active. We absolutely do need to be active. But until we understand our positionality and where we sit in relationship to everything around us, I don't think we're really going to get it. 

So do we need an entire new economic system or way of looking at it? Probably. But it's really hard to step outside a system that you're embedded within and to figure out what's another way of doing it. 

DAN ILIC: Next time on preppers we get a little hot under the collar as we look at what preparations are underway for our most deadly disaster. 

SARAH PERKINS KIRKPATRICK: We should be making changes basically now, in terms of how we live with heatwaves. But I just don’t think it’s clear to most people how urgent making those changes are.  

DAN ILIC:  Hey, if you’ve really enjoyed this, please tell someone about it? And we’d love it if you could, follow, rate and maybe even write us a review. 

Preppers is a production of the UNSW Centre for Ideas - produced and written by Sabrina Organo with presentation and additional comedic flourishes and by me, Dan Ilic. Production support from Cassandra Steeth. Sound mix and design by Julian Wessels.  

This episode was made on the lands of the Bidjigal, Gundungurra, Tharawal, Ngunnawal,  Ngambri, Gayamaygal peoples.

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