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Coastal cities worldwide are squeezed by two opposing forces: urban sprawl (扩张) and the rising sea. This struggle is intensely visible in the flatlands where expanding neighborhoods routinely flood and saltwater flooding damages the river mouths that protect communities from the worst of our climate crisis.

Massive resources are being put into environmental restoration projects, and development is subject to many layers of approvals. Yet in 2022 the commissioners of a coastal city voted to expand a legal boundary that contains sprawl to allow a 400-acre warehouse project. They are failing to see the value of this land in the greater ecosystem.

Wetlands, coastal plains and forests do cheaply (or even for free) what seawalls and pumps do at a cost of billions of dollars. They are vital infrastructure (基础设施) that makes us more resilient against climate change, and the cost of destroying them or weakening their ability to function must be factored into the decisions we make to build and grow.

To do so, the economic incentives to develop any natural landscape should be weighed against the protective economic value that land already provides. Economists call this an "avoided damage" valuation. Local planning boards might consider the value of a sand dune or swamp in flood protection versus the expense of replacing it with a seawall and water pump system. Maintaining and restoring natural infrastructure to support healthy functioning saves money, time and lives.

The concept of "natural capital", or the idea that ecosystem services should be valued in a similar manner as any form of wealth, dates back to the 1970s. Markets have always valued wood as a commodity (商品), for example, but not the services that came along with producing it, such as soil maintenance, carbon storage, and nutrient cycling. We didn't need a market for resources that industrialists saw as abundant (丰富的) and endlessly renewable. This exploitative (开发资源的) assumption turned out to be very wrong. Failing to measure the benefits of ecosystem services in policy and management decisions is a major reason many of those ecosystems disappeared.

It also seems crass to place a dollar amount on ecosystems that we'd rather view as priceless, existing for their own sake and valuable to humans in ways that are beyond capitalism. This preciousness is ethically sound. But developers have long confused pricelessness with worthlessness, allowing them to profit without paying for the consequences of destroying the environment.

Economic value is never the only reason nature is worth preserving; it is simply a powerful, underused tool to help us make decisions about how to live more sustainably in a climate-changed world. If policy makers considered natural infrastructure in the language of economics, they might recognize just how deeply we rely on it.