How a Beaver Helped a Country

A group of beavers just saved the Czech Republic €1.2 million.

In addition to making taxpayers happy, €1.2 million displayed the value of a beaver.

Improving an Ecosystem

In the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, located 30km southwest of Prague, officials planned to build a dam. Hoping to prevent acidic water from spilling into the Klabava River, the goal was to preserve endangered crayfish. However, a dispute over land ownership delayed the project after seven years of planning.

Meanwhile, eight beavers got to work. Explained by National Geographic, these semi-aquatic rodents dam streams with mud, wood, and rocks. Improving the ecosystem with their “beaver ponds,” they create a slew of benefits. While providing protection and food for themselves, the positive externalities of the wetlands they create spill over to aquatic insects, fish, moose, and much more. Indeed, beavers are our ecosystem engineers.

In a recent paper, several scholars showed us why the beaver is rather amazing:

Far from the Czech Republic, again improving an ecosystem, beavers saved Winzer €30,000 when their dam prevented flooding by slowing the flow of water down to this German town from 45 minutes to 20 days. Meanwhile, in Essex, England beavers helped to reduce the impact of draught by creating an enclosure that stored approximately three million liters of water.

Our Bottom Line: The Price System

Among the services provided by beavers, we could list water purification, greenhouse gas sequestration, biodiversity, and recreational fishing. Then, translating the first two into dollars, the annual benefit in 2017 from a beaver pond to the habitat was $133 million and $75 million for greenhouse gas sequestration. As a total dollar amount, the value of beaver ponds in the Northern Hemisphere (2017) was $332.6 million.

By giving the beaver a dollar value, that $332.6 million does what all prices do in a market economy. They give us information. After hearing a price, we know more about that item’s value and what we gain by sustaining it.

So although an ecosystem is priceless, by quantifying what beavers add, we can better recognize its value.

My sources and more: Thanks to a BBC podcast for alerting me to the Czech beaver dam.  Then this NY Times article, euronews, and National Geographic  had the facts. But most crucially, for a sustainability perspective, this paper told the money value of a beaver.

Please note that our featured image is a National Geographic photograph “By Dirk Eisermann/laif/Redux.”