Valuing ecosystems: Lessons from my North Star Transition internship
Should ecosystems valuations focus on economic value? Reflecting on her internship at North Star Transition, Lea Jordon-Tank seeks a holistic value framework that is at odds with received wisdom.
In the summer of 2025, I was in the thick of researching my master’s thesis for a degree in environmental law at the University of Edinburgh. I had become obsessed with a central question over the course of these couple of months: how to move away from valuing ecosystems in a human/nature dichotomy, centred around economic value, towards a holistic value framework which recognises that the social and ecological are inexorably inter-reliant. When I finally pressed ‘SUBMIT’ in August of that summer, a strange feeling washed over me. I had gotten nowhere close to answering my question.
A few weeks later, I started an internship with the systems change environmental not-for-profit North Star Transition. I found myself in the depths of its Fens Transition Lab, its Nature-based Solutions programme and its Governance lab.
My thesis work involved thinking about the – very technical – application of ‘value’ in ecosystem management decisions. The questions this raised in me did not get any easier to resolve the more technical the research became. Intriguingly, at North Star Transition, I found colleagues reframing these same questions surrounding ecosystem value as questions about people: understanding who they are within their natural environment, their role in their landscape and their capacity and desire for regenerative change.
This reorientation came as a bit of a shock. My academic research into environmental economics had me convinced that, unless we follow the classical economics path of rendering an environmental aspect into economic value of some sort, institutions would not organise around it. At North Star Transition, this cynical assumption has been challenged. In fact, there are many ‘outsiders’ to this dominant system of valuing nature only for the purposes of resource extraction. These outsiders recognise the damage caused by an undifferentiated instrumental conception of ecosystems, and are working collaboratively to advance alternative approaches. North Star Transition demonstrates this reorientation both in subject matter and working manner. From an insider’s view of what a ‘Transition Lab’ does, I’ve learned that combatting institutional assumptions and siloed thinking starts with gathering institutionalists and outsiders in a room together and getting them to think outside of their comfort zone.
Looking back, the frustration and disillusionment I felt when researching the economic turn in environmentalism has quietly shifted due to my experiences at North Star Transition. While my research demonstrated the debilitating effect of the capitalisation of nature, any alternative approaches I read about [1] seemed entirely inadequate to combat the wide-spread, capitalist-extractive turn in ecosystem governance. However, my work at North Star Transition over the past few months has shown me in practice what ‘regenerative’ and ‘socio-ecological’ value can create. I would like to unpack what I have learned, because – while often wishing I could re-write my thesis – I believe more now than ever that regenerative environmental systems work requires that we first ask the question what value(s) we organise ourselves and our ecosystems around.
‘Value’ as it is applied in Ecosystem Management
Throughout my masters in International Environmental and Climate Change Law, several terms repeatedly came up when talking about environmental management. I remember thinking that the usage of key terms such as ‘Ecosystem Services’, ‘Natural Capital’ and ‘Nature-based Solutions’ was strangely instrumental. Later, delving deeper into the origins of these terms and their consequences for the organisation of the human governance of nature formed a key part of my research.
The concept of ‘Ecosystem Services’, first popularised by the UN research initiative ‘the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’, is an effort to apportion value to natural elements in relation to the use they provide to human well-being [2]. To give an example, a stretch of forest is considered valuable to the extent it provides those who own or rent it with the “services” of flood regulation, water purification or wood for fuel. This distinction is key, because ecosystem value is limited to the instrumental use human ‘owners’ derive from it. In my thesis, I found a breadth of literature unpacking the harmful consequences of this ordering of ecosystems – from excluding the complexity of natural processes, to rigid management and an artificial separation of the needs of humans and the ecosystems they live in. Crucially, ‘Ecosystem Services’ do not serve the well-being of all humans in practice, but rather, a select, extracting, few. At this point in my research, it proved difficult to find an alternative approach that would account for long-term integrative health of ecosystems, while also removing the inequality of access and wealth that has dominated the human interaction with nature.
After several months of un-learning my assumptions with the ever-patient North Star Transition Team, I finally caught on to glimpses of a different approach. One of North Star Transition’ foundational values is the power of collaboration towards the advancement of shared goals and aspirations. Participants in a Transition Lab sit with the realities of a damaged landscape like the Fens in Eastern England, asking not how to achieve outputs, but rather, who to draw into an expansive dialogue about their values and experiences. Our team thinks iteratively about how dialogues should be structured, what questions will extend stakeholders’ viewpoints, thus allowing them to think and act beyond short-term needs, and thereby building relationships of trust. Whereas the mechanics of identifying and valuing a supply of ‘Ecosystem Services’ is a decidedly outputs-based practice, the processes participants experience in the Fens Transition Lab promote a plethora of values. Often, relationships between stakeholders start to rebuild, allowing people to let go of fixed preconceptions they may have of others in the community, as well as of the ecosystem they depend on.
A second key term I stumbled upon in the environmental management literature is ‘Natural Capital’, and relatedly, the practice of managing ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NbS). Both concepts make ecosystem preservation essentially a money issue. The central premise of NbS is that external investments in nature will ensure steady “returns” from certain ecosystem functions we rely upon, by increasing the resiliency and adaptability of the ecosystem “projects” they are situated in. Natural processes that often regenerate well when uninhibited are engineered in NbS, a strange maladaptation to over-extraction. ‘Natural Capital’, by contrast, makes ecosystem functions more of a balance sheet issue – essentially tallying their worth, assigning a monetary or economic value that represents a human assessment of ecosystem elements and their function. Yet, as common sense can tell you, balance sheet calculations do not say anything about the health of ecosystems, the demands made upon them, or the complex relationships and interactions that they depend on. The story being told is that natural elements like soil composition or air quality can be likened in value to financial or economic capital, and that calculating their value, as separate components of a system, is both possible and meaningful [3]. Many large institutions like development banks and investment funds adopted this perspective on ecosystem value. Indeed, the UK Government is one of the first to apply the idea of ‘natural stocks’ in practice, creating Natural Capital Accounts which, as of 2025, estimated the value of biotic elements in the UK at £34 billion [4].
The illogicality of environmental economics
When I first encountered these concepts in lectures and research, this kind of thinking immediately struck me as absurd. Economics is a narrative about how our societies function [5]. Taken as such, the narrative now being pushed by environmental economics is wreaking havoc on socio-ecological health by rendering our relation to nature into a question of natural resource allocation. As anyone who has ever walked in a healthy landscape knows, ecosystems do not operate like a machine capable of infinitely producing ‘services’. The natural world is made of complex relational networks with interrelated boundaries – these networks do not function for us, but with us. When we ignorantly exploit these sensitive processes, ecosystems pass tipping points that may end these processes for good. Although many of us know roughly what to think of when we talk of ‘ecological complexity’, it is crucial to face up to exactly what can, and does, go wrong when we try to monetise the unmonetisable, and thus simplify the complex.
Managing ecosystem elements through economics has always relied on the assumption that the ecological ‘service’ or ‘natural capital’ being used can be likened to a similar good or service – a practice also known as commodification [6]. Let's explore this absurdity. Today, if a market is to be created for the conservation of an ecosystem, as seen, for example, in Wetland Mitigation Banking or Payments for Ecosystem Services [7] this ecosystem process must be conceptualised as an imaginary ‘unit’ - a substitutable, temporally and spatially limited good or service with clearly defined boundaries, capable of yielding a predictable and consistent rate of return. In other words, something wholly unlike an actual ecosystem, which fulfils almost none of the criteria of a commodifiable good [8].
The assumption that ecological functions are infinitely self-repairing and will continue to support growth well into the future may sound familiar – for economists, this is part of the logic of substitutability, i.e. the idea that a good or service can always be replaced with another good or service should supplies run out. Again, this assumption does not map onto ecosystem characteristics [9]. As shown, ecosystems have tipping points that are unpredictable and sudden; human misuse is currently pushing six of those boundaries beyond stable functioning. Moreover, ecosystem processes and functions are unbounded and interrelated, making it nearly impossible to trade them as singular units of exchange. How could one square kilometre of wetland in England be equated to a square kilometre of wetland in Ireland with a vastly different history of development, ecological context and evolution? Conducting an itemisation of ecological features for commoditisation requires an absurd amount of contortion, including veiling the interdependencies within and between ecosystems by focussing on the production of units for exchange instead of the health of the system as a whole.
The economic turn in ecosystems management is not a fringe practice. Since the 1980s, it has rapidly become the prevalent way international organisations, states and regions organise their approach to the governance of nature. Driven by the alluring narrative that resource exploitation can be compensated through ecosystem investment, projects seeking to capitalise on the value of nature abound. Common approaches include biodiversity, species and wetland banking, carbon crediting, green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps, user fees, and payments for ecosystem services, to name a few [10]. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, most UN environmental organizations as well as UK Government and several local councils have taken up terms like these when they advocate for economic/financial instruments in nature management [11].
These instruments are driven by the logic that rendering ecosystem value into economic value will re-orient our systems. However, research has found the opposite to be true [12]. Instead, projects designed within this logic usually lead to short-sighted, isolated ecosystem interventions focussed on generating outcomes without considering interrelatedness, complexity, regeneration and thus long-term ecosystem health.
Where does that leave us?
Promoting a plurality of conceptions of nature’s value in an extraction-focused economic system is challenging for an organisation like North Star Transition. In the past months, I have learnt how our engagement with mainstream institutions may require us to use processes and structures oriented around the economic value of nature (because there is still space for this kind of thinking) while we also encourage and support the surfacing of a plurality of other values from within Lab engagements.
I have found a lot of hope in North Star Transition’s approach to landscape regeneration. It might seem obvious, but centring ecosystem health in a complex socio ecological dynamic must start with the people living in the landscape themselves. I have found a lot of inspiration in hearing from stakeholders in the labs who know and love the landscape they live in, and I have found comfort in the simplicity of gathering a diversity of perspectives together, despite the ensuing complexity this leads to.
Perhaps, in the summer of 2025, I made the typical mistake of a heady academic. In my frustration at failing to get clarity on what good ecosystem governance entails, I missed the critical source of where all ecosystem research springs from: A plurality of communities, each situated in a unique ecological context, developing a relation to nature long before economists pushed “environmental economics” onto them. It is exciting to see North Star Transition encourage the surfacing of an array of value conceptions in its working groups, and fascinating to see the project of building trust and empathy among a diversity of actors move forwards.
[1]Sander Jacobs et al, ‘The means determine the end - Pursuing integrated valuation in practice’ (2018) Ecosystem Services, volume 29; Kai Chan, ‘Rethinking ecosystem services to better address and navigate cultural values’ (2012) Ecological Economics, volume 74; Nathan Bennett and others ‘Environmental Stewardship: A Conceptual Review and Analytical Framework’ (2018) Environmental Management, volume 61.
[2]Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: A Framework for Assessment (Summary) (Island Press 2003); Brendan Fisher et al, ‘Defining and classifying ecosystem services for decision making’ (2009) Ecological Economics, Volume 68(3).
[3]J.B. Ruhl et al, The Law and Policy of Ecosystem Services (2007).
[4]Office of Natural Statistics, ‘UK Natural Capital Accounts: 2025’ https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/bulletins/uknaturalcapitalaccounts/2025
[5]Kate Raworth, 'Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to think like a 21st-Century Economist’ (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our time (Beacon Press 2002).
[6]Stewart Lockie, ‘Market instruments, ecosystem services, and property rights: Assumptions and conditions for sustained social and ecological benefits’ (2013) Land Use Policy , volume 31.
[7]Yung En Chee, ‘An ecological perspective on the valuation of ecosystem services’ (2004) Biological Conservation, volume 120.
[8]Gonzalo Delacámara and others, ‘Ecosystem-Based Management: Moving from Concept to Practice’ in Timothy O’Higgins and others (eds), Ecosystem-Based Management, Ecosystem Services and Aquatic Biodiversity (Springer 2020) 40.
[9]Deborah McGrath, ‘Valuation and Payment for Ecosystem Services as Tools to Improve Ecosystem Management’ in Robbins K (ed), The Laws of nature: Reflections on the evolution of ecosystem management law and policy (University of Akron Press 2013).
[10]Morgan Robertson, ‘The neoliberalization of ecosystem services: wetland mitigation banking and problems in environmental governance’ (2004) Geoforum , volume 53.
[11]Michael Holder, ‘Government urged to formally recognise natural capital as critical UK infrastructure‘ https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4523908/government-urged-formally-recognise-natural-capitalcritical-uk-infrastructure
[12]Sian Sullivan, ‘Green Capitalism, and the cultural poverty of constructing nature as service provider’ (2009) Radical Anthropology; Kathleen McAfee, ‘The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets’ (2012) Development and Change, volume 43(1).
