Only about 120,000 orangutans remain in the wild, and despite the whopping $1bn that has been spent on protecting them since 2000, their numbers continue to decline. The orangutan is the most endangered great ape, but the picture is only marginally less grim for the others – except us, of course – and the trend is the same across the living world: we’re witnessing a sixth mass extinction. Given that current conservation efforts aren’t working fast enough, many feel it is time for some out-of-the-box thinking. It doesn’t come much further out than giving other species their own money, but that proposal is now on the table. The first to benefit might be our intelligent, red-haired cousins.
“Interspecies money” is the brainchild of British futurist Jonathan Ledgard, who has built a reputation for throwing out imaginative, left-field solutions to the planet’s existential threats. He started with a few key observations. First, biodiversity tends to be high where people are poor. Second, technological advances such as drones, smartphones, genomics and data storage have made it easier and cheaper to track wildlife. And third, new software tools including cryptocurrencies, blockchain and artificial intelligence make it possible to create digital avatars with agency – including spending power – in the real world. If we can do that for humans, he thought, why can’t we do it for nonhumans, allowing them to trade with us for the things that matter to each?
It’s an idea that’s a little hard to get your head around, especially if, like me, you’ve observed orangutans learning to count and stumbling over their ones, twos and threes. But in Ledgard’s plan numeracy isn’t required, at least not by the nonhumans. An orangutan would be given its own digital wallet that would be managed by scientists or conservationists on its behalf. The wallet would initially be endowed with the proceeds from sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). If NFTs can capture the value of one-off digital artworks, they can presumably do the same for rare species – or related digital entities. This money would be paid out to people living near the animal in exchange for protecting or observing it. As more species were drawn into the scheme, their value having been similarly recognised, a digital currency might emerge – Ledgard dubs it the “life-mark” – overseen by a central “Bank for Other Species”.
The idea of interspecies money struck John McArthur as mind-blowing when he first heard about it. The director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC was already convinced that the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030 were unlikely to be met without some kind of technological breakthrough, and he thought Ledgard’s plan harnessed one. “Ultimately it’s about digitising the ecosystems of the world in a way that allows us to understand [other species’] preferences, which is interspecies communication,” he says. Brookings included interspecies money in its list of frontier technologies for sustainable development this January.
Another fan is Costa Rica-based economist and entrepreneur Ranulfo Paiva Sobrinho, who sees interspecies money as a way of empowering local people. Once they have understood the problem, Sobrinho says, locals often propose better solutions than people far away. Others have been more circumspect. Economist Pavan Sukhdev, former president of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) International, disagrees with Ledgard’s starting premise, which is that markets have failed to price natural capital correctly (this was also the conclusion of the recent, and controversial, Dasgupta review commissioned by the UK government).
Markets deal in private assets whereas nature’s resources are a public good that is provided free of charge, he says – and the two don’t mix. “Ledgard’s paper is steeped in the underlying belief system of so-called free market capitalism, which is that markets are the solution to all problems,” Sukhdev says. “That is wrong.”
Joshua Farley, an economist at the University of Vermont, agrees: “Rather than trying to internalise nature into the economy, we should focus on internalising our economy into nature.” He gives the example of Brazil’s Atlantic forest, which has been so denuded that many experts now fear it faces catastrophic biodiversity loss. Farley’s group has been exploring how a tax might be levied on carbon or wealth that Brazilians could only pay in an “eco-currency” – the Mata Atlântica Restoration Currency (Marc). Marcs in turn could only be earned through reforestation activities, with the regenerated forest’s extent and hence its value being determined with the aid of geolocation.
The advantage of such a scheme is that it gives people an incentive to do the right thing, says Paul Ferraro, professor of human behaviour and public policy at Johns Hopkins University. For at least a decade debate has raged over the relative advantages of utilitarian and non-utilitarian approaches to conservation – or protecting nature in exchange for some personal reward as opposed to doing so because it fulfils a moral obligation. One thing seems clear, Ferraro says: on its own, “doing the right thing is not an effective conservation strategy”. Though the debate rages on, it looks as if the right incentives can complement people’s moral drive to conserve. His worry is that the wrong ones could detract from it, so the choice of incentives is critical.
Ferraro is not sure the life-mark is the right incentive. It does not seem to solve the central problem that the costs of conservation are borne individually, while the benefits are enjoyed collectively, he says. But he agrees with McArthur that technology is providing exciting new ways to think about that problem. Building on Ledgard’s plan for orangutans, for example, he wonders if NFTs could be used to pair conservation goals with the acquisition of digital assets. One example might be a scheme just launched by the British-South African nature channel WildEarth TV, where people pay to own digital material relating to individual animals – rather like adopting an animal in the virtual realm.
At any rate, a number of economists I spoke to welcomed Ledgard’s contribution to the debate, even if they don’t agree with him. “We should be entertaining all ideas, because we have not solved the problem,” says Ferraro. The problem is only set to get worse, and whether interspecies money is the correct response or not, Ledgard the provocateur has achieved at least one of his aims – by prompting people to search for answers in new places.
Further reading
Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link by Bernard Lietaer and others (Triarchy, £12)
Nature in the Balance: The Economics of Biodiversity edited by Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn (Oxford, £40)
The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar Prasad (Harvard, £28.95)
