Economy and ecology: two words, same origin

• Supporting Services (nutrient recycling, primary production, soil formation, provision of habitats and pollination)

• Provisioning Services (food, raw materials, genetic resources, water, medicinal resources, energy, ornamental resources, biogenic minerals - quartz, diamonds, pyrite, calcium, etc.)

• Regulating Services (regulation of species, pest and disease control, waste decomposition, carbon capture and climate regulation, water and air purification).

• Cultural Services (historical, spiritual, recreational, therapeutic and cultural).

If we want to internalise those 'externalities of the economy', the greatest challenge of current markets seems to be a clear tendency towards 'globalisation'. Today, local markets tend to disappear, engulfed by the global market. Certainly, in order for a global market to emerge human culture must be totally homogenised and standardised. This seems to be against the very nature of humankind, so diverse in its ethnic groups and cultures. Perhaps in the future markets could be created around to ecoregions responding more or less to the same ecosystemic and cultural conditions.

Planet Earth, as a global ecosystem, has an 'connectivity' factor. This connectivity can be clearly seen in the ways that elements such as water and air flow. They do not know boundaries or limitations as moving from one location to another on the planet.

Today, universities teach subjects such as 'environmental economics' and 'natural resource economics'. For the former, the main focus of study is how to allocate prices for pollution; and for the second, the focus is what would be the most efficient rate for the consumption of natural resources.

We can learn some economic strategies from case studies where environmental damage was successfully minimised and the use of natural resources was improved:

Fisheries regulation: A study compared the strategies of the USA and Canada for managing commercial fisheries. The USA adopted a 'command and control' approach in terms of fish size, zoning and fishing effort; Canada implemented ITQ or Individual Transferable Quotas, which much better represented the reality of the fishing industry. The results of the implementation of both strategies showed that the Canadian scheme maintained and even increased fishing stocks and industry profitability; the opposite happened in the neighbouring country.

Transportation: Singapore, a nation with high purchasing power but with a very small territory, has developed its best possible transportation policy to deal with environmental harm. As a result, Singapore today has no traffic problems and no significant levels of air pollution associated with car usage. Among its solutions: an annual quota system for new vehicles registration. Registering a car became more expensive than buying a car, but the quota system also created a market where car owners could freely transfer their car registration to other new car owners. Singapore also established different prices for tolls and parking, according to zones and times. Importantly, a large percentage of the funds raised by the government with this car registration approach were directly invested in public transport, that is, transforming a problem into a benefit for citizens.

Land use regulation: In Thailand, in the village of Tha Po, it was demonstrated in an economic study carried out by two economists that the removal of 550 ha of mangroves for the purpose of prawn aquaculture produces more damage than profit because mangroves are breeding areas for many other commercial fish species. The elimination of mangroves affects local commercial fishing and in addition removes the economic benefit of the mangroves in relation to flood and soil erosion control, affecting agriculture and the property industries too.

Land use and water regulation: In 1989, the City of New York, with almost 9 million inhabitants was forced by the new 'Healthy Water Act' to acquire water purification plants valued at $8 billion. The local government, instead of investing in expensive plants, invested in buying the lands upstream - some 56,000 ha throughout the catchment area of the Catskill-Delaware basin, from where 90% of the city water comes from. These lands are located about 250 km upstream. At that time the area was subject to the following land use: 61% forestry, 500 farming stations and some 60 rural villages.

New York's great achievement was to acquire land upstream to its water sources. This land was worth $240 million, and another $310 million over ten years. As a result, New York's government saved on the difference between the investment that would have been outlaid on purification plants and the price of the land acquired. The water quality of the basin has dramatically and directly improved as a result of the services of a now protected ecosystem – also improving local biodiversity. As a bonus, the city's new land began to produce income from the tourism and recreational industries.

In a nutshell: markets are always flexible and tend to look for efficiencies. Today, the undeniable tendency is to incorporate environmental efficiencies.