Corals as Service Providers: Ecosystem Services and Value Relations Between Coral Scientists and Corals

• In Event: Relations and Troubles of Tools of Valuation – II

Abstract

In this paper, I examine and dissolve a tension visible in coral science valuation practices. Coral science is replete with appeals to the value of reefs. These appeals take many forms, including often a particularly economic one: claims about ecosystem goods and services (abbreviated to ecosystem services). For example, it is claimed that the various services provided by coral reefs per hectare per year are worth $352,249 (with several important caveats (Costanza et al., 2014)). Debates about ecosystem services often occupy extremes: to some, putting a monetary value on coral reefs is a pragmatic prerequisite to saving them. To others, it exemplifies the extractionist mentality which is driving the coral reef crisis in the first place.
Despite this criticism, coral scientists regularly employ the language of ecosystem services, in both academic and public-facing outlets. Given that this is a discipline whose practitioners are famously affectively, socially and culturally connected to their objects of study (Braverman, 2018), this might seem odd: why should they utilise language which commoditises corals and reproduces the very kind of thinking which threatens them in the first place?
Using an empirical grounding in interviews with coral scientists, and analysis of coral science documents, I argue here that the view of ecosystem services from within coral science is more nuanced than the two extreme points often found in ecosystem service debates. This points to new, more relational, ways to discuss the value of nature, which recognise economic importance of reefs but without being reducible to extractionism.

Author

• Elis Jones