What if we could see the invisible? The magnificent blue whale, stretching 110 feet long through ocean depths, remains completely invisible to our economic systems—until it's killed. In this profound Earth Day conversation with Ralph Chami, we discover how reconnecting our market systems with living nature might be our most powerful tool for planetary healing.
Recently, the Māori People of Aotearoa, Cook Islands, and Tahiti supported a resolution to endorse their ancestors, the whales, as Ocean Ambassadors to the United Nations and to protect their legal personhood. This historic move aims to help protect the whales against dangers such as ship strikes as they migrate through their South Pacific waters.
Climate change experts confirm that humanity still has a (narrow) chance to prevent global mean temperatures from rising more than 1.5°C by 2035. But it falls on non-experts to turn the experts’ projections and advice into policy—and perhaps more importantly, into public awareness that results in needed behavioral changes and support for new policy initiatives.
Currently, ships and whales share the ocean. Their interaction, however, has been devastating for the whales, as ship strikes have continued to be a primary cause of whale fatalities, along with entanglements among others. Because whales have existed for millions of years relative to the recent advent of ships, whales have not evolved fast enough to recognize the danger from these vessels.
At COP28, the Nature Positive Pavilion promoted Nature Talks, a platform where influential speakers and experienced leaders converged to deliver impactful TED-style talks on leading nature for climate action. Diverse experts shared transformative ideas, innovative solutions, and personal insights that inspire change and ignite conversations surrounding the crucial role of nature in addressing climate challenges for people and the planet. In this talk, we invite you to listen to Ralph Chami, a financial economist with 25 years at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and co-founder of Blue Green Future and Rebalance Earth.
“Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth…”
"The value of a living whale is zero, $0, zero in any currency. I'm a financial economist. And I'm listening to these scientists bemoaning what's happening to the whales, and I wanted to help. I didn't know how to help. And I thought, wait a minute. Maybe I can bring your message to the audiences around the world. Maybe I can translate all of that value, those services that they do for us, in a language that we can all understand. It's the language of dollars and cents."
A sustainable future needs a new nature-positive economic paradigm: if we stand up for nature, nature will continue to stand up for us. Dr. Ralph Cham has developed a model for valuing natural capital, including blue and green nature, flora and fauna, and a framework for developing the natural capital markets for ecosystem services.
This Taskforce on Nature Markets paper, with Ralph Chami and Andreas Merkl, maps the risks and equity implications in emerging nature credit markets as a new asset class, namely as natural assets arise, and new markers for ecosystem services develop.
How much is one living blue whale worth in the fight against climate change? A lot more than you may think, says financial economist Ralph Chami. He explains the value of bringing the language of dollars and cents to conservation—and offers his vision of a new economy that would profit off regenerating nature, not extracting from it.
