Would you pay $1,000 a year for a remote patch of mangrove swamp?

Maybe not — but more and more environmental economists are arguing that you should.

And they say that the worst financial crisis in 80 years could be a good opportunity to overhaul the world’s economic system and put a price tag on what are often viewed as “free” services from nature, ranging from coral reefs’ role as nurseries for fish, to wetlands’ ability to purify water. See the story here.

Markets failed to regulate banks in the current crunch and they are doing even less to slow global warming that the U.N. Climate Panel projects will bring far bigger economic problems — more droughts, floods, heatwaves that disrupt food and water supplies and rising seas that could swamp low-lying coasts from Bangladesh to Florida. 

In a 2006 report into the costs of global warming, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said: “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.”

Of course it’s hard to place a fair value on the natural world. What’s the value of the mid-Atlantic Ocean? What would you pay to try to stop the accelerating melt of Arctic sea ice in summer? What’s the price of the Amazon rainforest’s ability to soak up greenhouse gases?

Governments have often given up such debates in despair and concluded that nature’s services as either free or infinitely valuable: without nature, after all, none of us would be here. But more and more experts say a wider system of price tags on nature are a first step to slow damage. 

One U.N.-backed study, for instance, estimated that a hectare of mangrove in Thailand, properly managed, was worth a minimum $1,000 a year as a renewable source of food, fish or wood and could have other benefits as a barrier against coastal erosion. If you converted the area to a shrimp farm, it would be worth just $200 per hectare per year. (…in the picture at the top left, people are planting mangrove trees in Aceh province, Indonesia: the 2004 tsunami showed they limited damage to coastlines).

What do you reckon? Is the financial crisis a good time to revalue nature? And is it possible to work out a fair price?

Antarctica’s population is rising because of climate refugees.

The European Union agrees to let Morocco join in return for exclusive rights to solar power from its part of the Sahara desert.

The Olympics are held only in cyberspace because it costs too much for athletes to travel around the world.

These are some of the scenarios in a report on Monday by British-based think-tank and charity ”Forum for the Future” with Hewlett Packard Labs, imaging how climate change might affect the planet by 2030.    

You may well say: ”Hang on, 2030 is only 22 years away; things won’t change that fast.” But imagine travelling back 22 years to 1986 — when Ronald Reagan was in the White House — and telling people about the end of the Cold War, 9/11, the Internet or even the 2008 global financial crunch. You’d have trouble convincing them all that was realistic.

Yes, some of the ideas in the report can be dismissed as outlandish scaremongering or wild optimism. You don’t have to believe them, but they drive home the idea that the world can change quickly and that people can go a long way towards controlling what happens.

Read more about the scenarios here

What do you think?