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.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference. Ralph Chami champions a new economic paradigm that is equitable and nature-positive.
But those guys, because they eat a lot, what do you do next? You poop a lot. And their poop turns out to be incredibly important because it fertilizes the phyto. So you have this wonderful cycle. OK? The whale feeds on the krill, the krill feeds on the phyto, and the phyto eats the poop of the whales to get more active. And when the phyto gets more active, it grabs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So just imagine: the whales, they capture carbon on their body. Unfortunately, at some point they die, and they’re so heavy they sink to the bottom of the ocean. And anything below a thousand meters is sequestered almost forever. And through their poop they also fertilize phyto, making phyto even more active, grabbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
