How Much Would You Pay for a Park

There was a moment during the billionth lockdown of the pandemic where my wife was feeling completely at her wits end. All of us trapped in the house day after day, arguing over desk space for 2 work from homers and 2 home schoolers, and her trying to transition her business to a virtual model. It was a lot.

So, at 10am one Thursday morning, she turned on her out-of-office and took off to spend the day in a national protected area near our home. She spent the day hiking and just hanging out in nature. She came home feeling like a million bucks. And throughout the rest fo the pandemic, she made sure she got out into nature at least every couple of days. Sometimes it was just a walk in the park along the river near our house; sometimes it was cross country skiing in that larger protected area; and sometimes it was a day at our rustic cottage. It healing for all the stress the pandemic has induced.

We know that spending time in nature has tremendous benefits. I won’t delve deeply into the science, but at a personal physical health level, we know that natural spaces purify the air and reduce respiratory afflications. Being in nature is shown to decrease stress levels and reduce risks of heart disease. We’re starting to understand how time in nature has tangible mental health benefits, especially for the exploding number of people who deal with anxiety, depression or other mental illness. And at a macro level, there are also studies that show that areas with more natural spaces have higher levels of community cohesion and connection.

Having natural spaces is such a compelling concept, that the Japanese government — when they realized that stress levels in Japan were at crisis levels — made investing in nature a key pillar of their response. Read about it in the excellent book The Nature Fix — Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative.

But protecting nature can be tough. Developed want to build houses. Farmers want more agricultural land. Mining and forestry companies create a lot of wealth by exploiting, and destroying, nature.

And protecting nature costs money. In an era where government budgets are tight, investing in nature is sometimes seen as a luxury.

But there is good news. As we start to understand — and quantify — all the reasons we would want to protect nature — the health benefits, the role wetlands play in reducing flooding, the carbon that gets stored (sequestered) in in tact landscapes — all sorts of new actors are coming forward wanting to invest in the protection of nature.

Insurance companies are investing. An insurance company will pay to rehabilitate a wetland, because it reduces flooding. The tiny investment in the wetland is paid back 10-fold through reduced flooding and the associated insurance claims.

Infrastructure investors — they are these massive private investment funds that all of our pension money is held in — will pay for shoreline natural restoration because it a cheaper way to treat municipal wastewater than the super expensive wastewater treatment plant they would have otherwise built.

And hopefully one day, public health agencies will invest in national parks, as they begin to internalize the data showing that getting people into nature saves, literally billions of dollars in avoided health care expenses.

The movement to invest in nature is nascent. The investment community is beginning to see the importance and the opportunity, but they lack to tools and the language to incorporate it into their traditional investment models. There are some organizations like The Nature Conservancy who are trying to help, but it’s early days.

But for all the potential, there is not nearly enough action and urgency in it. I’m hoping the pandemic has highlighted the need and we’ll see a lot more of these novel forms of investment into nature in the very near future.

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Previously Published on medium

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Photo credit: by Tomas Anton Escobar on Unsplash