How much is a whale worth, dead or alive?
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
We're used to thinking that nature only has value when we extract it.
Dead trees become timber. Living nature, by default, doesn't get a price.
Ralph Chami has a different view.
Ralph is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Green Future. He spent 25 years at the International Monetary Fund, before turning his focus to valuing living nature as an asset class.
When we spoke at the World Ocean Summit in Montreal, he explained the gap that started his work:
"Kill a whale, chop it to pieces, you fetch 40,000 in Japan. So in death, it has a price. In life, it has no price, actually a price of zero".
"What is the value of the services provided by a living whale? Turns out, $2 million over her lifetime."
Ralph explained that the whale's role is to move nutrients. She fertilises the phytoplankton, which is the foundation of life in the ocean and captures around 33 gigatons of CO2 a year globally. More phytoplankton also means more krill, which means more whales. A virtuous cycle. On top of that, a whale stores carbon in her own body, and when she dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, that carbon is locked away for good.
None of that gets paid for. The market only pays for the dead version.
Ralph's argument is that this isn't a moral problem first, it's an incentive problem. And once you put a number on living nature, you change what the market protects.
In our conversation, he goes deeper into how he got from a whale-watching trip in 2017 to building a new field he calls Science-Based Finance.
Check out the full episode on The Ocean Age Podcast, available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Comments