The NCC will hold a NatureTalks: Natural Capital event at Memorial University on Thursday that will include both local and mainland guest speakers.
Dan Kraus, national conservation biologist for the NCC, will put the idea in perspective during his lecture, which is open to the public.
“There’s going to be a few different speakers. Some people will be talking about the value of nature from kind of a tourism and marketing perspective, some people will talk about nature more from a resource perspective in terms of forestry and fisheries,” Kraus said. “But we are going to have some speakers there, including myself, to talk about the services nature provides to people and how we can put a dollar value on those services.”
Natural services, which may be taken for granted, actually hold real value, Kraus said.
“A good example would be cleaning water, or water purification. Nature in wetlands and forests cleans water naturally and when we remove those forests or those wetlands we remove that service of water purification,” he said. “If we’re using that water for drinking that would mean that we would need to do added purification, and there’s an economic cost to that.”
By removing natural services, we have to replace them with man-made services to create the same outcome, he said, and this in turn would cost more money than what preserved land had accumulated.
Kraus says he has visited every province and territory in Canada except for Newfoundland and Labrador, and his excitement for the trip revolves around rare species found in the province’s wilderness.
“I’m hoping to get out to (NCC’s) property on the Salmonier River, partly because there’s globally rare species on that property that are more endangered than pandas,” he said. “Some of the best places left in the world for them are in Newfoundland. That interface of land and ocean is so unique and I’m hoping to get out and see some seabirds as well because of the abundance and diversity.”
The NCC has operated in Canada since 1962 and in the province since 1996. In that time it has protected 13,000 acres in Newfoundland, 74,000 acres in the Atlantic provinces and 2.8 million acres across Canada.
“It’s kind of something that we have inherited, the benefits of those natural places from past generations. It’s something we can pass on,” Kraus said. “We do have an abundance of nature in Canada and we haven’t really had to worry too much about it in some places, but we know that we are losing species or we are losing habitats. I think we need to start thinking a little bit more about what we want Canada to look like in, say, 150 years from now.”
