Flanked by homes and factories, the Nakivubo Swamp in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, would appear to be ripe for development. But the city has instead chosen to keep Nakivubo largely in its natural state because it filters sewage and industrial effluent that would otherwise flow directly into Lake Victoria. “Economic logic prevailed,” says Pavan Sukhdev, a former Deutsche Bank economist who in 2010 led a United Nations study called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. A sewage treatment plant would have “cost $2 million per year to do what the swamp was doing for free, and they don’t have that money.”
That decision has provided ammunition for Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and lawmakers from scores of nations seeking ways to save oceans and the atmosphere. The idea is to move beyond gross domestic product as the primary measure of national well-being and take into account the value of water retention, air-scrubbing, and coastal protection provided by trees, soil, and reefs.
