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Transcript

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0:00There are some questions we rarely ask ourselves when we talk about economics. What if capital isn’t only in banks, but also in forests, rivers, and the soil beneath our feet every day? Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences. and will discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research.

0:31Disclaimer, the voice for the guest translation was generated using artificial intelligence. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, the podcast that builds bridges between nature and human beings. In Colombia, one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. In Colombia, one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. Every decision about livestock, farming, mining, road construction. or agriculture affects something that doesn’t always show up in official figures, just sustains our very lives, natural capital.

1:04Today on Science Behind the Glass, we are going to look at nature not just as a landscape, but as the foundation of our economy and our human stories. Our guest is Dr. César Augusto Ruiz, biologist and researcher in natural capital, ecosystem services, and socioecological resilience. Cesar, it’s a pleasure to have you on Science Behind the Glass. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation. To start, how did you end up combining biology, economics, and sustainability?

1:34Where did that come from? Thank you both so much. It’s a pleasure to be here in this space. That’s a very interesting question, and my students and colleagues ask me the same thing sometimes. I remember when I chose my degree. I chose biology back in 1994 because my gut told me it had very few numbers involved. I never considered myself good at math, statistics, or models, probably because of the traditional way I was taught in secondary school. Once I finished my undergrad in biology, I was working mainly with botany, specifically with the taxonomy and systematics of mosses, liverworts, and lichens. I had the opportunity to do my undergraduate fieldwork in Tarapaca in the Amazonas region. It was intense fieldwork with the Amazonian Institute of Scientific Research, CINCI, here in Colombia. And I started noticing something very interesting. All the conservation problems I could see around me, not just in relation to indigenous communities, but also involving economic actors, were tied precisely to economics. And I started reading, working, trying to understand. And I thought, why are we always blaming the economy, economic development, economic growth as the main driver of biodiversity loss and environmental damage?

2:42So instead of criticizing it, I decided to study it. It seemed far more interesting to understand economics from the inside. what the theory actually says, how it works, than to just criticize it from the outside. That’s when I did a specialization in mathematics and then a master’s degree in economics. And it was, let’s say, quite a collision. But without a doubt, it opened up my perspective. It helped me understand the impact that a discipline from the human sciences, economics, has on absolutely every system on this planet. To understand it deeply, the theory, the econometric models, the worldview of disciplines that are often far removed from biology. From that came my interest, and I started studying economics with a focus on economic valuation, alongside the models and theories themselves. That’s really interesting, and it actually raises another question for me right there. Is worth thinking about where the focus is placed when you give economic value to things in nature? Is it the individual, animal, a species, a plant? The functions of any ecosystem or what we have talked about before, what are called ecosystem services. Could you walk us through a bit about how the valuation of different natural components actually works? This step of valuing nature, ecosystems, natural resources, including human beings in that equation, what I call socio -ecological systems, has a very important starting point. First, we have to remember that, at least in the current academic consensus

4:13and in what the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES, states there are three ways to value nature and natural resources. And here comes the first question. Who does the valuing? Human beings. We are a complex species with a complex brain, and we constantly assign valuations to everything around us. Among those three forms of valuation, the first is intrinsic valuation. In practical terms, what I work through with my students is understanding that biodiversity and natural resources have value in and of themselves, value I cannot monetize, and that they fulfill fundamental ecological functions and processes. In some of my ecology classes, I discuss with students what’s more important in a moorland ecosystem, not just as a hypothetical, the spectacled bear or a nematode that looks terrifying in a photo with those huge teeth and makes you think, ugh, what an awful creature. both have genuinely important value from the standpoint of ecological function. Intrinsic valuation brings together all the work done by biologists and ecologists from pure disciplines, taxonomy, and systematics to understand what we have in nature and what their roles are in the ecosystem. But there’s another form of valuation, relational valuation, and this is where the concept of socio -ecological systems starts to come in because human beings are part of nature at different scales. Through our relationships, being embedded in these socio -ecological systems, we naturally develop cultural ties, perceptions, and notions

5:43about what nature is. Indigenous peoples anywhere on the planet have a relational valuation of their natural environment because they’ve built an evolutionary and historical relationship with their territory. That’s completely different from the relational valuation of someone who is 100 % urban, who thinks water comes from the tap rather than from an ecosystem and a whole set of processes. and it’s different again from the relational valuation of a business administrator, a manager, a CEO of a tech company, because those relational values are built from lived experience.

6:12And finally, we have instrumental valuation, what we call economic valuation. In some of my research, I’ve tried to integrate all three forms of value. But what exactly is the goal of economic valuation? Economic valuation is grounded in environmental economics, which has existed since the 1960s and 70s. as a response by economic theorists who wanted to make visible the social cost of environmental damage. That was the original question, how much does air pollution cost a society? How much does water pollution cost?

6:44That was the starting point, evaluating environmental cost. And that has a very interesting power because it allows us to make decisions in a world that, whether we like it or not, affects all of us in one way or another, the economic system we live in. add something here because it ties into something else we have talked about on the podcast. We measure things through GDP. The economic losses from ecosystems simply aren’t reflected there.

7:10And that leads me to another question. How do you draw the line between a useful tool and a dangerous reduction of nature to numbers? How do you avoid oversimplifying even though I know you are actually trying to capture all those ecosystem services and it is incredibly difficult? Especially when it comes to make that understood in political and economic terms. And what you are describing is so interesting because usually, as you said, valuation happens after the fact.

7:39Like, okay, if we build a hydroelectric dam here, how much will people benefit? But never the impact before. What’s going to do to the ecosystem and to us? Because we are part of the ecosystem too. That integration is always missing. That’s a really good question, Linda. In any discipline, natural sciences, physics, economics, reductionism is very tempting. And in global economics, the history of our society, particularly after the Second World War, when economic development systems were set up to pursue growth in GDP, the entire human race unfortunately fell through sheer hegemony into absolute reductionism. Well -being equals growing GDP. Improved quality of life equals growing GDP. Many studies by Professor Robert Costanza, Rudolf de Groot, and researchers from Latin America have shown that quality of life and GDP growth don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

8:32GDP is the total material wealth generated by a society in a given period of time, measured in money. So we’re already dealing with a reductionism that has become hegemonic. You can see it on any news channel or in any newspaper. There’s always a section for economic indicators. The dollar went up, the dollar went down. Where did oil open this morning? Inflation rose. This country’s GDP grew 25 % and that automatically sends a signal that says, invest here. We have reduced social and cultural behavior to a set of metrics that we now consider natural when they’re not.

9:05So what about the economic valuation of natural resources and ecosystems? It’s not about embracing reductionism, it’s about starting from a clear conceptual framework. The framework I work within is called Total Economic Value which is also used by IPBES and by colleagues I’ve worked with in Spain, like Berta Martín López. The idea is, natural resources have multiple values, relational, intrinsic, instrumental. I cannot, for instance, economically value the spiritual or religious importance of an ecosystem to a community, whether indigenous or not. That would be like asking you, How much would you pay to stop your god from disappearing? Or how much would you pay to stop your loved ones from being gone? There are limits we can’t cross. So total economic value recognizes that any economic valuation of natural resources is always going to be an approximation. Why? Because economic valuation measures what societies can instrumentally use, directly or indirectly, from those natural resources.

10:04But there are other values, intrinsic and relational ones, like spiritual values, legacy values, existence values, that go to the very root of what value means. In economics, value means price. But in human societies, value means the fundamental principles that drive behavior. So whenever economic valuation is done, at least in my research, we state clearly that it’s a methodological and conceptual approximation with two concrete objectives.

10:31The first is to reveal that monetary value of nature so we can inform decisions and engage with other actors. And any economic valuation is explicitly an approximation. I still review some articles for journals like Ecological Economics, and when I look at ecosystem valuation studies, say from Iran, the good ones say, this is an approximation. We cannot confuse the method with the purpose. Why does Iran want to value its mangroves? Why does Denmark value its ecosystem services? to help develop policies, policies that don’t replace ecological management, economic management, or social management. So reductionism is what happens when someone says to me, so that mangrove ecosystem is worth $120 million per hectare, so if I have that money, I can just buy it and clear it. No, it’s an approximation of value aimed at specific ends, one of them being policy development. Right, and that’s really interesting. It makes me think of what you mentioned.

11:28that GDP and the ways we measure growth and wealth depend fundamentally on material products that ultimately have to come from nature. Based on that, we have a core problem, which is land use change, happening everywhere in the world. A lot of land that was under conservation or less intensive uses has been shifting, and that has caused enormous losses in nature and, as you say, in the socio -ecosystems. where peoples are also part of the picture. So how could we bring the kind of research you do in a more practical role, one that allow us to negotiate with sectors that have their own interests, livestock farming, housing, and agriculture, sectors using vast amounts of land and changing it to extract wealth?

12:16That’s an interesting question, and here we get into something environmental economics also offers us, economic instruments. What do economic instruments do? Take land use change, for example, at the global level. You might know the concept of payments for ecosystem services, where a community receives a certain amount of money to stop doing something harmful or to improve a productive practice. Because for any human being, in any context, change is hard. Imagine a rural community, historically rural, where slash -and -burn agriculture, which is enormously harmful ecologically, has been practiced for three, four, five, six generations.

12:51Maybe in their relational context, they simply don’t know there’s another way. You show up as a conservationist and give them a strong speech about how they’re destroying the ecosystem, and you tell them to switch to agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, all of that, and the farmer says, okay, but how? And if I barely have enough to survive, who’s going to help me change? So in the context of land use change, it’s important to understand three things. First, in Colombia specifically.

13:17The biggest driver of ecosystem loss throughout our history has been livestock farming. And here I want to make a point I make with my students too. The problem isn’t the machine, it’s the mechanic. I’ve had students say to me, Professor what? So cows are bad? No. The way we implement an economic activity, whether it’s livestock farming, agriculture, or mining, is what makes the difference. We have different social actors at different levels. There’s the smallholder farmer, very common in the global south, with a subsistence plot, whose society needs to change their production methods, maybe toward agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, different practices, because as a society, we… re -losing benefits and money through water contamination, use of agrochemicals.

13:59That person needs incentives, and the incentive might be payments for ecosystem services. In Latin America and the Caribbean, for example, we have land tax reductions for conservation. though I’m quite critical of those instruments, because like any tool, if applied poorly, you end up compensating actors who don’t actually need the incentive. Then there’s another segment, mid -scale producers. Not large landowners, but not subsistence farmers either. For them, it’s a dual effort. Environmental economics has to incentivize, but the core goal of an economic instrument is to change behavior. Here I’ll open a short parenthesis with an example. In Colombia, around 2016 and 2017, A tax on plastic bags was introduced. Before that, you’d go to the supermarket and get 200 bags to wrap everything. Now you arrive and they say, bring your own bag. Do you want us to charge you for one? 150 pesos, 200 pesos, 500 pesos. Environmental taxes are supposed to change behavior in theory. An environmental tax that gets collected widely has failed. It actually hurts me when I see news in my country, and I’ve seen it in Peru too with carbon taxes and in Ecuador, where I’ve also worked. where the government announces, this year we collected 1.8 trillion pesos from the plastic bag tax.

15:12From an environmental economics standpoint, I say, we failed. Because the best environmental tax is one that isn’t collected because it actually changed behavior. And here’s where valuation matters. If a tax is set too low, I go to the supermarket and think, instead of carrying my own bags, I’ll just pay a dollar and get 10 bags. That’s not really costing me anything. So I keep buying the 10 bags. The government collects the tax. Or instead of reducing my greenhouse gas emissions at the source, I buy carbon credits or pay a $10 per ton carbon tax because that’s cheaper than actually changing. So an instrument that doesn’t recognize who its target audience is can create perverse effects or simply not work. There’s a lot of research on this globally, especially around carbon taxes. Back to land use change. We have to identify the different segments. Who gets incentives, subsidies depending on the country and its laws? who needs stronger environmental education and behavioral change, supported by a smaller or graduated subsidy, and who genuinely doesn’t need incentives at all. Because then we have the large landowner, the large -scale rancher, the monoculture farmer, the extensive livestock operation, where income is not the barrier to change. For them, you need a tax or another instrument that actually makes them change. And here, economic theory is interesting.

16:28Even if the motivation is purely financial, the outcome still happens. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons, they change, and the environmental damage is avoided. That’s what happens with land use in Europe and other countries when the economic incentive is graduated, well -designed, and recognizes different actor types. We help those who don’t know how. We persuade those who have some capacity. And we change the behavior of those at the top of the destruction pyramid. Because environmental economics, unlike the way we understand GDP and conventional economic growth models, cannot be applied uniformly. It has to be analyzed case by case, because environmental economics is context -dependent. And that example you gave about plastic bags is so interesting in relation to incentives.

17:15Because you’re right, for a lot of people, it is easier just to think. Well, I forgot my bag. I will buy one this time. But instead of offering an alternative, I remember how years ago supermarkets had boxes, car boxes, and they almost had no bags. So people would just grab the box and take their groceries home in them. You forgot, it was easy. So when they offer an alternative that depends on the person, and I would say even on the socio -economical level, they accept it.

17:48The incentive works differently. It is about perception. So much of the economics is about perception. Exactly. And beyond that, Linda, what’s been sold to the majority of society? Let’s not think about those of us who know about environmental issues. Let’s think about the 8 billion 300 million plus people who either couldn’t or didn’t want a background in environmental science. For that broader population, price as an economic signal is extremely powerful. Returning to the point, the foundation in values, environmental education, making science more public and accessible, all of that is fundamental. But that generational shift is still catching up with us, while we already have the consequences of global climate change bearing down on us, along with many other planetary boundaries we’ve crossed through our economic activity. When a student walks into an economics class at any university in the world and sits down for their very first introduction to economics, the professor is going to say, economics is the science that seeks to efficiently distribute resources in a society. That’s a concept that goes back to 1786. And right there, the construction of economics begins, built on efficiency, but not on justice, not on equity, and not on socio -environmental consequences. And in fact, there are critics of this. I love reading Joseph Stiglitz, who is a sharp critic of the economic system as it stands. Not because he’s against private property or against the market, but because the system, as it’s structured, focuses solely on efficiency. And the problem with efficiency?

19:17Think of a society like Colombia or Ecuador. The government has a budget. Its one overriding goal is GDP growth. That’s the job of a finance minister. So that state budget has to go toward mandatory obligations, defense, minimum health care, minimum education, but there’s money left over that the government has to invest through public -private partnerships or incentives. And what’s the first instinct of the top economist at the ministry? Put this resource where it’s most efficient. What’s generating returns right now? Mining. Let’s become a resource extraction economy. Export coal, not much science involved.

19:51Immediate returns. Where do I place this budget? on this community doing agroforestry and green production, or on the large ranchers who guarantee short -term profitability. So the problem of efficiency has permeated every level, and that’s precisely why price, as uncomfortable as it can be when we say the approximate economic value of a mangrove is such and such, can be a powerful signal. It can help change behavior, and that’s ultimately what drew me into researching socio -ecological systems. In this race for our own survival as human beings, imagine a kilometer race. We’ve already covered 990 meters using science and technology. But those last 10 meters that remain require a behavioral change in things we’ve normalized and believe are natural. Hyperconsumption, economic growth, the idea that more is always better, the images of what progress and success look like that come to us from all media, from our education, all of that has made us normalize situations like the ones we’re living through right now. And when something is normalized and deeply internalized, changing it is hard. But when we use that normalized agent, price, and put it in service of something, we can start to get results a little faster. I agree. And you also have a study on the natural capital of the Magdalena Cauca basin, where you talk about enormous losses affecting 80 % of Colombia’s population. Is that natural capital up here as an explicit figure in the national budget? How do you think it would change the economic and political conservation about development in Colombia?

21:22Because right now, if I’m not mistaken, I was listening to a podcast with an economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economy. And he was saying that, unfortunately, Colombia is stuck in the 19th century. I think he was being generous. I once read a book by a Cambridge economist, Raj Patel, called The Value of Nothing. He makes a comprehensive assessment of economic behavior and how economics relates to environmental and social problems. In his introduction, he described interviewing candidates for the economics PhD at Cambridge, and some of them would say their goal was to bring economics into the 21st century.

21:57Raj Patel would respond, if you can bring it to the 19th century, that would be enough. And I think the same applies to Colombia. We’re stuck. partly because of intellectual poverty in our environmental institutions, and partly because of a genuine lack of interest in reflecting the economic value of nature on top of vested economic interests. Including environmental accounts and GDP is not a new idea in Latin America. Chile tried it for years, even partly during the Pinochet dictatorship, and when democracy came, you’d think political style wouldn’t matter, but it turned out the interests remained the same. CEPL, the Economic Commission for Latin America, has been insisting since the 1980s that the best path for developing countries rich in natural resources, and I’m not talking about oil, coal, or gold, I am talking about ecosystems, air, water, complex ecological relationships, is to start reflecting those in forest accounts, in ecosystem accounts, accounts that speak to the complexity these systems actually have. But then comes the concern. If we include environmental accounts in GDP, accounting for lost or conserved ecosystems, our GDP might not grow the way we need it to for the world to keep seeing us as a viable nation. The world decides whether a society is viable based on whether its GDP grew between 1 and 2%. If it drops or stays flat, then it’s a collapsing society that needs intervention.

23:14So against that globally entrenched principle, that economies need infinite growth, which has been debated for over a century, countries like Colombia remain, economically speaking, operating with institutions that haven’t changed since the colonial period. And it’s not just Colombia, many countries that had our experience, Haiti, Indonesia, where I had the chance to work for a time, South Africa. So the GDP question, the idea of showing, as in this publication, that we’ve lost 80 % of our natural capital and converted it into infrastructure with a relatively limited lifespan, and that this represents many billions of pesos, is about showing the glass half full.

23:50We lost this much, but we still have this much. If that were reflected in GDP, the economists inside the governmental machinery of the global economy would say, don’t include it. How are we going to say that in 2020 we lost 1.3 trillion pesos in natural capital? Better leave that out and stick to manufacturing, energy, and other elements. But this is changing. I’m very enthusiastic about the European Union’s environmental accounting initiative, where they’re starting to be genuinely transparent, for the first time in many years, about what they’ve lost and what they have left.

24:21Countries raising their hands and saying, yes, we acknowledge that today only 3 % of our natural forests remain. We’ve lost a lot, but what’s left, we’re going to develop in specific ways. That starts to create a different global logic. But in South America and Central America, we’re far from that, because we haven’t internalized that value. So measuring it, promoting it, making noise from wherever you stand, that’s a first step toward recognizing it. That’s really interesting.

24:47It actually leads me to the next question. Bearing in mind the evaluation you have done of the Orinoco, Magdalena and Kaukabasins, which are enormous, and the way the results are framed largely in terms of what has been lost through not conserving these basins and their functions, what would happen if we started maybe… as a block of developing or tropical countries, the ones with the most natural resources to sink, not only in terms of what we have lost, but in terms of the potential we have to recover these major watersheds, these great tropical forests. started to position that potential as, I don’t know, a different economic philosophy. Do you see anything on the horizon in the next 10 or 20 years that could take hold as a different theoretical framework for economics that makes this a central factor rather than just something on the margins if GDP growth slows down? The good news and something that, in my head and in my heart, set a goal for me at some point in my life. I want to economically value Colombia’s natural capital. That was actually sparked by publications that appeared around 2004 and 2005, as revealing as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which introduced the concept of ecosystem services and the value and benefits of nature not just to scientists but to policymakers.

26:16People might think, a work like the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, first version in 2003, second in 2005, and which has continued to be developed and which inspired multinational and multilateral bodies like IPBES. How different is it really from the work done in the 1990s on deforestation and environmental damage? Technically the same foundation. The difference is it chose to position the issue at the level of global policy. And unfortunately, the analysis of climate change also helped push these topics into the political arena, even though it’s sad that we’ve had more than 30 years of climate negotiations.

26:5230 COPs and haven’t gotten good results, you have to see the glass half full because some results are coming. The same is true for biodiversity COPs. The global logic has been shifting, not at the speed we want, not at the speed we need, but it started changing 20 or 25 years ago. Initiatives like the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, around 2006 and 2007, led by Dr. Pavan Sukdev, who I believe is now the president of WWF, showed us that economic invisibility of nature was, if you think like an economist, going to work against us in the long run. So there are many initiatives. What do I think the first step is?

27:31The first step is generating information and validating it. Economically valuing the remaining and lost natural capital because we value both in the Amazon Basin, the Orinoco, the Pacific, the Magdalena Cauca, and the Colombian Caribbean to have a country -wide synthesis. That was not just my work, it was the work of many colleagues and it took more than 15 years. 15 years of finding the data, cleaning it, generating it in many cases, validating it against international literature and other experts, explaining why we were publishing a natural capital figure and what the goal was, making it clear we weren’t. T just presenting a number, cause we’re not accountants, we’re academics. We wanted to present the underlying causes as well. Livestock farming, okay, but eating meat isn’t the problem. The way we’re doing livestock farming is tourism in the Colombian Caribbean, yes, but the policy isn’t going to be ban tourism. It’s going to be regulated, directed.

28:28Natural capital lets you understand the historical causes and identify the real problems so you can design the right policies. And then the ribbon on top of that whole package. We attach a value, compare it against Colombia’s conventional GDP, as many other studies do, and the first jolt that creates is, how can this much money be invisible? That starts a conversation. Without a doubt, I see changes happening, not as fast as we need, but more and more organizations, not just researchers, are engaging with this. Companies at the global level take Puma, the first company globally to decide, independently and transparently, to economically value its environmental externalities. That was around 2013 and 2014. They had $300 million in profit. They calculated they were generating $94 million in environmental damage throughout their value chain, and they asked, how do we fix that? How do we simplify our supply chain?

29:22And it’s not just Puma. Many companies globally are doing this, and frameworks like the circular economy are helping it happen. So from the private sector, things are moving, perhaps much faster than from government. And as citizens, in my case as a scientist, generating that information is step one, disseminating it is step two. Educating people that environmental economics isn’t about going to a store and trading money for a pencil, but that it’s a set of chains that help us understand complexity in a different way. That’s another step. And continuing to push on the political front, knocking on those doors wherever they’ll open. Yes, and what you just said about the private companies moving faster than public ones. The key word here is transparency. The transparency in their accounts showing how they compensate.

30:10how they transform, how they can offset their environmental damage. And that leads us to the next question, which is related to socioecological resilience. What is that? How do we apply it in Colombia? That topic has drawn my attention for a long time, even when I was still working mainly on natural capital. Because let’s start with the concept of resilience itself, which has become very popular lately in all kinds of media and conversations. You have to be a resilient student, a resilient work. are, just be resilient.

30:40But what actually is resilience? What’s interesting is that resilience is a concept born in psychology. In the mid -20th century, late 19th, and early 20th centuries, actually, with the rise of psychoanalysis, one thing psychoanalysts studied was why we change or don’t change. And the term resilience was coined. In the psychological and behavioral sciences, resilience is basically your ability, your mental model, your way of living, to absorb a great many external blows and stresses, many of them unpredictable, without losing your identity and without, to put it plainly, losing your mind.

31:13That concept started gaining traction as, by the mid -20th century, We began talking about systems dynamics, understanding that computer systems, economic systems, ecological systems have dynamics that are not linear with multiple feedback loops. And one of those wonderful books that launched systems dynamics was Donella Meadows’ work on the costs and changes of development from 1972. It used systems dynamics for the first time, and we and science, academia, started to realize that systems have an identity, just as you have yours. Daniel has his, and I have mine.

31:46Systems have identities. What they are today depends on a vast number of non -linear factors, and many of those causes will generate states we cannot predict. So the jump from resilience to systems theory allowed us to understand that we have to see systems with all their multiple causes and consequences in a more dynamic way and to understand that s not just internal variables or deforestation and livestock farming that account for environmental damn. There are educational processes, even religious ones, even spiritual ones, that make a system what it is today. I tell my students when we talk about ecological and socio -ecological resilience, deforestation doesn’t have the same consequences or the same causes in two different places. We have to understand what makes each one particular. Ecology, by the late 20th century, began adopting the concept of resilience and applying it to ecosystems, studying, for example, How long it would take a mangrove forest to recover all its ecological functions after a major hurricane or typhoon?

32:45How much time did ecological systems, mangroves, moorlands, any given ecosystem, need to recover after being subjected to severe stress? And then specifically after 2012, thanks to work by some Nobel laureates in economics, the conversation moved to socio -ecological resilience. The argument was, these systems are not purely environmental, not purely economic, we are coupled socio -ecological systems that we haven’t understood yet, and we need to understand resilience as the capacity of those social and environmental systems together to absorb changes and pressures without losing their identity. When a system loses its identity, when it changes trajectory, that’s when things become irreversible. A very interesting example of socio -ecological resilience research is the work of Professor Carl Folk. whose analysis shows that if we keep increasing deforestation, the Amazon could reach a tipping point where we, V, made so many changes that instead of a forest, we end up with a savanna. Socio -ecological resilience means considering not only environmental variables, but also social, economic, and cultural ones.

33:48With that concept in mind, and understanding the complexity of socio -ecological systems, a few years ago I said, why not measure socio -ecological resilience in Colombia and propose a measurement index? trying not to fall into reductionism but trying to bring all this complexity into something understandable. And Colombia has very particular characteristics, interesting and at the same time painful ones, more than 80 years of armed violence. If someone wants to measure socio -ecological resilience in Vietnam, you’d have to factor in Vietnam’s historical variables. But if I want to measure it in Colombia, I have to understand that there are drivers of change like levels of education and violence.

34:26That’s why, in our resilience analysis for Colombia, this first index for Colombia published last year, what we were seeking was a first approximation. Where do we stand in terms of resilience? Can it be measured? Absolutely it can. What does that resilience data tell us beyond natural capital? More, actually, because it includes historical, economic, and political variables that economic valuation alone doesn’t capture. Is it better than natural capital analysis or ecology by itself?

34:52No, it’s a different way of presenting things. Why is it important for a society to understand its ecological and systemic resilience? Because if we see very abrupt changes, the system can reach a point where we don’t know where it’s headed, from a systems theory standpoint, and many of those outcomes could be far worse than what we’re living through now and could compound the consequences of climate change. When we built this first socio -ecological resilience index for Colombia, we already knew beforehand that we’re a country highly vulnerable to climate change, and that vulnerability is not only due to our geographic position, but to our political and institutional structure. When a disaster strikes, like the hurricane that hit San Andres and Providencia six years later, we’re still talking about reconstruction. But when a hurricane hits the New Orleans region in the United States, within seven months, reconstruction is essentially complete. Because there’s an institutional and social response capacity that goes far beyond what an ecosystem alone can do. And one of the central conclusions of the socio -ecological resilience analysis for Colombia is this. As long as we maintain the current scattered and fragmented levels of violence throughout the country, we can keep investing millions of dollars in ecological restoration. And we will keep suffering.

36:03Environmental and social losses. It’s not just deforestation as a product of violent political dynamics, like the expansion of illicit crops. Behind all of that is also displacement, and when you lose your rural identity, you lose the foundation for rebuilding a territory. In Colombia, more than 5 million hectares are in the process of being returned to people displaced by violence. But it’s not just about returning the land, it’s about how we reconnect all those relational values.

36:31Resilience helps us understand that there are structural phenomena. and in Colombia’s case they are very clear. The first is violence, not paramilitary violence, guerrilla violence, or dissident violence specifically, but the cycle of displacement it has generated. That is a direct cause of our social and ecological systems losing resilience. The second cause is economic, how we’re directing GDP resources toward different activities. We’re still a country, even under this government that promised change, that has subsidies to the mining and extraction sector of 32 -36%. If we start solving those structural problems, we release pressure from the pot. Because as long as the problems of territory and violence go unsolved, our resilience will keep declining.

37:14And one of the most striking results of this research is that the department performing worst after La Guaira is Antioquia. And some colleagues said to me, but wait, Antioquia is doing great, it’s thriving, it’s entrepreneurial. That’s a cultural and mental model. Yes, I can believe I’m the most beautiful prince on the planet, but what am I really? Antioquia is a department where, leaving aside the case of La Guajira, which despite significant GDP growth, all the phenomena of multiple forms of violence, the reshaping caused by illicit crops, illegal mining, are very quietly doing what we call in resilience.

37:48Latent variables, pulling the D. Parment’s total resilience downward, even below Vichada, Guaviar, or Caqueta. From the standpoint of our country, those might seem like the jungles where nothing is happening, but a lot is happening. and that determining factor, the incidence of violence and the way legal and illegal economic development is unfolding, is precisely what resilience allows us to see in greater depth. We can step out of the comfortable side and start asking, what do the country’s violence statistics actually mean?

38:16How do I interpret human displacement beyond the human tragedy to understand how those flows of population are generating real changes in all natural systems? How does it work, deforestation first, then illicit crops? Then livestock farming arrives, but the community has already moved elsewhere. The community that moved isn’t the villain. The armed actor is another actor in the system. How do we understand all of that? Right. That’s a really fascinating angle. Moving on to another challenge in science and more specifically in academia, we have the capacity to publish a lot of things year after year, paper after paper. But in reality, very few of them have a tangible impact on society or on nature. How do you face that as someone working in economic research? And can you give us an example, something you remember where economic research had a more concrete effect, something that actually improves things in Colombia or somewhere else? Fortunately, there are many examples, but let me talk a bit from my own experience, because there’s something I discuss with my students. I used to teach a course on environmental policy and legislation at the university where I work, the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, until last year. Students studying environmental biology, as Linda did at the time, or marine biology, need some context on how environmental legislation works in their country. Because either we end up working in academia or in consulting, we have to live on something. But the interesting part was always the discussion about what policy actually is

39:46and how policy configurations work. And we have to look at the political context in history, which in Latin America and the Caribbean has many similarities. But the trajectories have made us radically different, even from countries as close as Venezuela or culturally similar as Ecuador. So, when you start to understand that the political context is a long -term conversation, the first thing you have to figure out is your own place in the world. My place right now has one foot in academia and one foot in consulting.

40:14I also work with an international organization on the consulting side. Let me give you a very concrete example. There’s a large infrastructure project in Colombia, a port in the Department of Antioquia, and I’m an auditor on that project. The job is to say, look, you have to meet environmental standards. You have to ensure that any damage to biodiversity and ecosystem services is compensated physically through planting and conservation and economically in the case of social damage to communities. And the response is, but I have an environmental permit and the law doesn’t ask me for that. Yes, but you’re asking a bank for a loan and the bank won’t lend if you don’t meet those standards. We’re back to the economic instrument.

40:52That’s a very interesting way of starting to influence things. And it’s a good sign. Banks, even more local and regional ones, are saying, we want to lend, that’s the business of a bank, lending and moving money, but we don’t want to be labeled as mercenary banks. I’m working on a project in Mexico where the lender is KFW, a major German bank, and they say, look, you have to solve every environmental problem in this project or we can’t lend. And that forces a change in attitude. Whoever receives the money to build an ammonia plant has to understand that they have to do it better than anyone. If not, there’s no money, and that starts to create a kind of pedagogy. The portfolios of all banks are changing at impressive rates, and that’s where I’ve found space to spread this work. At the local level, it’s sometimes been much easier, or in my case, it’s been much easier to reach an international audience than to reach local decision -makers like Columbia’s Ministry of Environment. Though through some national media outlets we’ve managed to get press coverage, and through civil society initiatives, there’s a very interesting one in Colombia called Parkways Como Vamos, where we presented the economic value of the natural capital in Colombia, S National Protected Areas, and that got media coverage.

42:02Thinking that you’ll automatically influence a political decision the moment you publish is naive, but it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And that frustration, I see it in my students. What’s this for, nobody’s going to pay attention? But in education, in communication, there is enormous power. Why are banks today imposing such stringent environmental and social requirements on projects, costly standards that must be met or no loan? That didn’t come from nowhere. It came from social pressure. And how did that social pressure build?

42:30Through networks and media. Every disruptive historical event from the French Revolution to today’s conversations about responsible consumption starts with social communication networks. If we use these tools, if we carry this message clearly, it will have a significant impact. And in my professional life as a consultant, it has had an impact. Very difficult, very frustrating because they don’t want to do it. We’ve never done it this way, that. S just how engineering works. But why should I build a higher electricity tower just to save those five trees? How much are those five trees worth? It’s always going to be difficult. But that’s what we are as a society. If we all thought the same way, we wouldn’t be a society, we’d be a colony of bees or something like that. We think differently. So we have to recognize that those stress factors and frustrations are always going to be there. Everyone thinks differently, even those of us in this conversation who share a common goal. Influencing policy is highly desirable. But historically and socially, we’re talking about transitions that take time.

43:30Revolutions and transformations have taken decades, centuries in some cases. Right now we’re at a crossroads, but we have the tools of communication and diffusion. As an academic, I have two fundamental purposes in my life. One is to publish academically what I generate, because that ultimately gives you credibility when you face political actors who don’t read. There’s a very interesting publication from 2018 and 2019, where a team of marine biologists came to me and said, Cesar, we want to hire you and your team to do an economic valuation of what could be lost in the Gulf of Tribuga and Cabo Corrientes if the Department of Antioquia and the government keep insisting on a deep -water port in an area where the last remnants of mangrove forest remain, specifically 906 hectares. We did the consulting work. We found that Marviva and many organizations had been telling the Antioquia government and Congress for more than 15 years.

44:24Look, the humpback whales reproduce here. There are five sea turtle nesting sites here. Look at the mangroves. But with the government that came in around 2018 and 2019, that megaport project in the Gulf of Tribuga on the Pacific coast was reactivated through the National Development Plan. So we did the study, we generated values, we published in a prestigious international journal, so we could then bring it to the NGOs we were working with, like Marviva, make noise in the media, and even speak before a congressional commission to explain what they’d already been told for years, abo, at the turtles, about the whales. But this time we came in and said, look, this is how many millions of dollars would have to be paid or compensated in some way to the fishing communities if that port is built in that location. Because the problem isn’t the port itself. It’s where it’s going to be built and how. The alternatives are A, B, C, and D, and that’s where systems modeling comes in. But this is what it’s going to cost society. Are you prepared to be responsible for that? The NGOs, the media, that pressure, when a topic makes noise and gets traction, is perhaps one of the personal experiences where I’ve genuinely felt satisfied that we managed not to kill the project, but at least to put it in the freezer for a while. And I’m not saying that the work of identifying the whale and sea turtle populations wasn’t important, it was fundamental for the economic valuation. But the message of what it would cost, and you are going to be responsible for this economic loss, that did make several decision makers scratch their heads. In fact, the company leading the project decided to archive all the studies, perhaps waiting for more favorable political conditions at another time, but it hasn’t happened. And that was accomplished with

45:56time, patience, and a clear awareness that yes, changing reality isn’t ideal. but reality changes with time, effort, and patience. And as a public academic, you need that validation, the ability to speak with certainty, and not just anecdotes about what you want to change. That is the strength of the academy. Yes, I completely agree on something very important here. We recently had as a guest Carlos Guarnizo, the director of Ciencia Café Paso Merced, and he told us about a case. the debate over evolutionary theory and creationism in the United States and how scientists went with a mountain of books, their own conception of the truth. Here’s the material without actually thinking about how to communicate with people who speak a different language in terms of like a context. For example, the politicians. How do you reach out people? How do you reach those members of Congress who have absolutely no idea why a humpback whale passes through there or why a sea turtle that are in danger are going to be lost? For them, it is simply not relevant because it is not framing economic terms. So it is about dumping things down. It is about gathering evidence and pushing. I think this is something science really lacks. I do believe science publications and rigorous studies give you a strong foundation and a credible voice

47:28that can eventually be reflected politically, especially in a specific case. Because when you are fighting for a ecosystem that is about to be lost or a place that is about to disappear, it’s far stronger when you have evidence from that specific place. Because many times the work is invalidated locally because ecological or valuation studies come from somewhere else. So I would say don’t stop being vocal, but be vocal with substance. And I think carefully about how to approach that politician who doesn’t want to listen or who has their own agenda. And as you say, social media works enormously well for creating pressure at the community level. I would say the voice that… needs to be amplified is the local community level one. From my perspective, the historical distance between academia and politics. I remember when I was just starting my career, I went to a Latin American botany conference. We’re talking late last century.

48:25I was amazed. I sat in on two working groups and both concluded the same thing. Academia is too far removed from politics. Two years later, I came back and the same conclusion. And I believe we in academia have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to moderate our discourse and our reach. Scientific publication, academic publication, peer validation in peer -reviewed journals, all of that is fundamental for academia to maintain its rigor. It’s just as important to publish that we discovered a new species of mosquito as it is to propose a new social analysis. Academia has a responsibility, or it had one. Sometimes I look at academia and feel anxious. But that fundamental responsibility is precisely this, to disseminate, to generate. The word academia comes from the idea of giving, concentrating, sharing. Teaching and generating knowledge that can be validated and replicated, that’s a core principle. If not, we’re just treating in anecdotes or other things. Is witchcraft different from economics? Only in method, not in the object of study. So, in academia, we have that responsibility, but also another one, to lower the language barrier.

49:31I tell my students and colleagues, if you truly know a topic, you should be able to explain it simply. And it’s not just that you should. It’s a real obligation, because what we do isn’t rocket science. We are trying to understand ourselves. And those objects of study deserve to be communicated with passion, with interest, with clarity, so that people may not understand the formulas and the model, but they understand why it was done. With my postgraduate students, when I assign an article on environmental economics, I tell them, I don’t want you to write the economic model used or the economic formulas on your presentation.

50:04I want to know, what was the purpose? What did you understand the goal to be and what is it going to be used for? All science in all its forms has a genuinely deep usefulness and we can’t lose sight of that. But those of us in academia also have a responsibility to communicate knowledge far more efficiently and to stop playing as if we’re in the 18th or 16th century, the club of Rome, seven or eight enlightened people speaking in different tongues. That world of the solitary genius is over. What we need now is to build networks, and networks are built through dialogue that everyone can understand.

50:38It’s not about lowering your level, it’s about rising to meet everyone else’s. Because we all have very different mental models, and all of them are valuable. Yes, I completely agree. Thank you so much for your time, Cesar. This episode was inspired by that other kind of accounting we rarely see. the accounting of rivers, forests, soils, and mountains that silently sustain our everyday lives. Cesar’s work reminds us that natural capital is not a technical metaphor.

51:08It’s the water we drink, the food on our table, the territories that have withstood conflict, neglect, and degradation. Putting numbers to nature doesn’t mean reducing it. It means making visible what we have taken for granted for decades. Cesar invited us to look at the economy through the lens of ecosystems, to build bridges with farmers and ranches, and to understand every land use decision is also a decision about our collective future. Remember that Science Behind the Glass is on a platform that connects the podcast with all major streaming services via RSS. Just click the link in the description to find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, YouTube, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Science Behind the Glass is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Daniel Esguerra, and Linda Hernandez -Duran, with invaluable support of our technical director, Rafael Jordano, and original music by our friend and colleague, Bernardo Aguila.

52:11Find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and visit our website for more stories updates. and resources and services. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and communities. Together, let’s amplify these essential stories. If this episode inspired you, consider supporting us with a contribution via PayPal. Just click the Support Us button on our website. Your support helps us grow and allows us to keep illuminating the human side of science. Until the next time.