‘Biodiversity protection doesn’t mean millions of job losses — economic activity which encroaches on ecosystems quantifiably harms humanity’
Eyal Frank is an environmental economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das, he outlines the economics of protecting habitats and species:What is the core of your research? Broadly speaking, my work tries to outline the social costs of bio-diversity losses.
Ecologists have been telling us that we are losing species left and right but that doesn’t explain how this loss of bio-diversity and ecosystems affects us in terms of its impacts on human well-being. A large part of my work tries to figure out this multifaceted puzzle by analysing what happens in a region in terms of tangible outcomes when it undergoes a significant decline in species.
A complement to this work is to see how effective conservation policies are and whether these tend to have large indirect costs as impacts on land or labour markets.What are the social costs which you found in your study on substituting biological pest control? We tend to think of pest control as done with human-made chemicals — but the world has always gained from biological pest control. Out in nature, crop pests have natural enemies which benefit us.
Such pest control might not be as effective as chemical insecticides but it’s free and doesn’t pose the health hazards of toxic compounds in insecticides. I found species of bats in the United States feed on insects — ecologists hypothesised that they provide a very important form of biological pest control and if they declined, farmers would have to compensate by increasing their use of chemical insecticides.
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