Economic Value
Coral reefs deliver ecosystem services to tourism, fisheries and coastline protection. The global economic value of coral reefs has been estimated at as much as US$ 375 billion per year. Coral reefs protect shorelines by absorbing wave energy, and many small islands would not exist without their reefs to protect them. According to the environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature, the economic cost over a 25-year period of destroying one kilometer of coral reef is somewhere between $137,000 and $1,200,000. About six million tons of fish are taken each year from coral reefs. Well-managed coral reefs have an annual yield of 15 tons of seafood on average per square kilometer. Southeast Asia's coral reef fisheries alone yield about $ 2.4 billion annually from seafood.
To improve the management of coastal coral reefs, another environmental group, the World Resources Institute (WRI) developed and published tools for calculating the value of coral reef-related tourism, shoreline protection and fisheries, partnering with five Caribbean countries. As of April 2011, published working papers covered St. Lucia, Tobago, Belize, and the Dominican Republic, with a paper for Jamaica in preparation. The WRI was also "making sure that the study results support improved coastal policies and management planning". The Belize study estimated the value of reef and mangrove services at $ 395–559 million annually.
Read more about this topic: Coral Reef
Famous quotes containing the words economic value and/or economic:
“A different world can be created or re-created—but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“Just as men must give up economic control when their wives share the responsibility for the family’s financial well-being, women must give up exclusive parental control when their husbands assume more responsibility for child care.”
—Augustus Y. Napier (20th century)