Wetlands are comparatively inhospitable for humans, so much so that land management activities such as draining swamps have come to symbolize improvement in many human affairs. Draining the swamps means civilization, gentrification, and unmitigated public good. It creates useful farm land, controls pests such as disease carrying mosquitoes, and creates navigable waterways where previously there was only impassable wilderness. Examples of large scale swamp projects in US history - New Orleans, Florida, California and the coastal states of the southeast - are stories of the rise of health, wealth and civic pride.

But, on second thought, maybe wetlands were even more valuable in unimproved condition.

In an important scientific paper in 1997, Robert Costanza et al estimated that in terms of ‘ecosystem services’ provided (waste treatment, food, water supply, recreation), wetlands, on a per hectare basis, are the most valuable ecosystems on Earth – many are worth up to $30,000 per hectare annually. . .

But the most under-valued property of wetlands is the ability of many of them to store carbon – indefinitely, as long as it’s kept waterlogged – and healthy natural peatlands not only store carbon, they also remove it annually from the atmosphere and add to the amount stored. . .

Peatlands are therefore ‘sinks’ for carbon – adding at least two tonne, and sometimes as much as five tonne per hectare per year. This means they have a significant annual value as a source of carbon credits – maybe $500-$1,000/ha/yr. . .

A recent American study for some North Carolina farmlands concluded that it could be economic to re-flood farms for carbon credits once the carbon price exceeds about $35/ha. . .

We can see everywhere the devastation wrought on under-valued natural resources – from Amazonian rainforests to the world’s fisheries. Market forces only work in conservation if you pay people enough to leave something alone – or, better still, to improve it. So by giving emissions a significant market price, wetlands should now be sufficiently valuable for people to be queuing up to save them.

Why price emissions and not other ecosystem services? If wetlands actually have the value attributed to them why do they need subsidy? Is there any truth to the claim that "market forces only work in conservation if you pay people enough to leave something alone"?

Where authoritarians see regulatory opportunity I see market opportunity. People will pay for waste treatment, food, water supply, and recreation. Forests and fisheries are over-exploited due to lack of property systems that allow markets to work. In instances where property rights are clearer - such as when there are tradeable quotas for fisheries and long term tradeable leases for forest tracts (see discussion of Canadian "Crown Lands") - market forces align with environmental objectives.

It's interesting that the estimated price for carbon needed to make reversion of farmland to wetland attractive, somewhere above U$35 per ton, is the same as that cited by biochar advocates. Maybe those North Carolina farmlands would be repeatedly dosed with char rather than converted to swamp. The world needs more farmland to produce the food, fiber and fuel needed in coming decades. Which is the higher public good? Who decides?

Whenever I hear narrow advocacy for some regulatory scheme that would support cherished dreams my first thought is always that it seems ungrounded in reality, ignorant of systems dynamics - untutored in the dark mysteries of stocks, flows, accumulation and turbulence. Yesterday's subsidized public goods - draining the swamps for example - are today's public problems, and today's subsidized public goods will be tomorrow's public problems. Biofuels are a currently emerging example, though there are many others that could be cited.

How can good policy be formulated?

A characteristic that is common to each of these areas of policy debate is uncertainty, or perhaps more accurately, competing claims to certainty, usually offered by those with a stake in the outcome of the debates. In today's ever-globalizing world, the effects of technologies - such as biofuels, renewable energy technologies, and financial instruments - are far-reaching and hard to see. Unintended consequences are to be expected. In this context, decision makers would benefit from an authoritative, independent perspective on technology assessment. Unfortunately, such capabilities do not appear to have kept pace with globalization and its consequences.

Of course, the challenges of globalization are not new. Not long ago in this space I discussed a very interesting paper by M. Scott Taylor of the University of Calgary who argued that a European innovation in the tanning of animal hides led directly to the slaughter and near extermination of the American bison in the latter part of the 19th century. One could follow a similar approach to tracing technological reverberations through governments and markets to ask whether early 1980s policy responses to technological advances in crop production led directly to the emergence of Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom.

I suspect that this recommendation is a false hope too, for the same reasons as cited above. If there was a bureaucracy charged with providing an authoritative, independent perspectives on technology assessment it would be captured by interested parties that have a stake in the outcome. The more power the bureaucracy had the more and faster this would happen. The irritating cacophony of competing claims to certainty offered by self interested parties is more useful for policy makers than authoritative assessment: stocks, flows, accumulation and turbulence again. The authoritative bureaucracy would be one more interested party making competing claims to certainty. It's a jobs program for wonks.

In my view markets - in the general sense of a discovery machine that weighs those competing claims by putting the claimants at risk to help focus their minds on what they really think when there are personal consequences - provide better information to policy makers than authoritative bureaucracies. That doesn't mean that policy makers will heed that information and make good decisions, or that markets will infallibly provide good information. It's just the best we can do. There will still be surprises, unintended consequences and grand failures, but perhaps fewer and less severe.

Update: Said another way

"The main thing we found is that if you want to conserve species, that policy might not be compatible with carbon sequestration," said co-author Andrew Plantinga, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University. "On the other hand, if you want to get carbon out of the atmosphere, it's not clear that will be good for species."

The take-home message, he said, is this: "When you think about policies targeted to private landowners, government has to be careful about how it does this because it may achieve one objective but at the expense of something else."

The evidence is weak, just scenarios and models etc., but the point seems obvious to me. It isn't just that bureaucrats must be careful about interventions, it is that the idea of targeted intervention to optimize single factors doesn't work. There are always trade-offs in natural systems so the best approach is to seek general robustness, including the people in those systems, and take pleasure in that however any single factor varies. Adapt management to those results, helping the system develop as it seems to want rather than fighting against the system to force it to some arbitrary state beloved by bureaucrats.