The old-fashioned way to conserve a reef, or any precious habitat, was to put a fence around it (virtual or real) and say “No, you can’t go there, we have to protect this bit”. Later, zoned management systems came into being, like the
one that is used to effectively manage the Great Barrier Reef. Both of these are based on an assessed but often intangible value assigned to the reef, along the lines of its being “important”, or “unique”, or being home to X-many species found nowhere else, but ecological economics takes a different approach. Under EE, you work out exactly how much that importance/uniqueness is worth, in dollars, and then create a
market for those services that can raise money to protect it. For reefs this might include the value to fishing industries of reefs as fish nurseries, or the value of reefs to the SCUBA diving industry, maybe even the value of productive reefs as carbon sinks in the global carbon budget (if indeed they are). Having put a value on those services, we can then raise money to restore degraded reefs so that they can provide those services. We can either extract fees for people to use those services, a bit like fixing up a rental property, or we can sell the restored reef outright, which is more like flipping a house.
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