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Eyal Frank is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. Eyal is also affiliated with the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago (EPIC). As an environmental economist, he works at the intersection of Ecology and Economics, with a focus on understanding the costs of conservation policies, impact of market dynamics on wildlife levels, and how animals fit into human economic systems.

Below, Chicago Policy Review’s Shivani Shukla discusses Eyal’s interdisciplinary research with earth’s nonhuman co-habitants as protagonists, the ecological emergency, policy solutions to the crisis, and Princess Mononoke.

Source: Harris School of Public Policy.

Shivani: Hello, Professor Frank. Thank you for joining me today.

Professor Eyal Frank: Hello, thank you for having me.

Shivani: What led you to work at the intersection of economics and ecology?

Eyal: Broadly speaking, ecologists tell us that species are in freefall and biodiversity is declining. We are losing species left and right and the response most people that are not ecologists have to this is, ‘this sounds bad. So what? How will it impact me?’ The question I wanted to better understand was, “what will the social costs of these biodiversity losses be?”

I did not start undergraduate (studies) knowing that I wanted to work specifically at the intersection of economics and ecology. I was interested in social sciences and natural sciences, and problems that involved both. Then very quickly, I understood the key role that economics plays in decision-making, and that ecology and the importance of species and natural inputs is something that we do not understand well enough. I did not think that I would end up getting a PhD but seeing how little we understood about the intersection of those two topics excited me about the opportunity to contribute and extend our knowledge there.

Shivani: Let us go deeper into your research. What projects are you currently working on and what are some projects that you are excited about?

Eyal: There’s one project that I have been working on for about a year. It started out as a moonshot project as we had no idea if we were going to find something there. But the question was just so interesting, and the environmental change, or should I say catastrophe, was so overwhelming that we really wanted to understand if everything we heard and saw anecdotally was reflected in the data.

So, somewhere in the 90s and early 2000s across the Indian continent, there was a massive collapse in vulture populations. Think of something in the order of magnitude between 30 to 50 million vultures declining to just a few hundred, maybe a few thousand within less than a decade. You could argue that vultures are not exactly the definition of mega charismatic fauna and look like they are going to smell. (Their disappearance) sounds like potentially an improvement in terms of the environment and property values. What could go wrong?

It turns out that vultures are really important because they are scavengers. Another way to think about it is they are the great sanitary workers of the environment.  Vultures are a way of spraying bleach over the environment because their stomachs are so acidic, 100 times more acidic than ours, allowing them to kill bacteria and pathogens that fester in dead biological matter. So, if vultures decline and we lose that sanitation function, we should be concerned as to what will happen in their absence.

My co-author Anant Sudarshan and I took that question seriously and compiled data on health, where vultures were found, and what happened before and after the population collapsed. We found a sizable increase of close to 8 to 9% overall in human death rates after the collapse. We also saw a massive increase in feral dog populations, along with higher water pollution across regions of India where  vultures were decimated. We had a system that was incredibly reliant on vultures, and as they went away in just a few short years, we did not pay the price of substituting them because it was prohibitively expensive. and so, these areas saw extremely high levels of pollution.

Indian White-backed Vultures. Source: Flickr.

Shivani: It is quite intriguing! Talking of another bird species, can we discuss the Northern Spotted Owl paper?

Eyal: The Northern Spotted Owl is a super fascinating case of an iconic poster species when it comes to the Endangered Species Act. It was first listed in 1990, but even now in 2022, it is highly debated and constantly used as a precautionary tale about consequences to jobs and economic activity when we seek to place protections on the environment. So, for over three decades, we have been shouting from different sides of the argument as to whether we have lost many jobs and have we decimated the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest?

I had to produce the last chapter for my doctoral dissertation. So, I tried to answer that question. We have the data on jobs by sector in the Pacific Northwest, in the USA and Canada, and on related economic sectors. Are we talking about job losses in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, from owl protection? They are not zero, they are not infinite. It took four years to publish that paper that then became co-authored with Ann Ferris. We realized that there was some truth to the story of labor effects and found about 30,000 to 32,000 jobs were lost in the logging sector, or about a 28% decline. That was in no way close to the logging industry’s communications of a magnitude of 120,000 and upwards of 500,000 lost jobs. It was important that we managed to bound and quantify those losses. We produced many estimates, taking the economic recession of the 90s, technological changes and higher timber imports into account and getting back to the same results.

Northern Spotted Owl. Source: Shutterstock.com.

Shivani: Talking of data collection or data and methodology in general, I am interested in how you create novel datasets for all these projects, or what is the kind of primary data source you use to start putting together a paper?

Eyal: Broadly speaking, I rely heavily on secondary data sets. I do no field work, and I definitely don’t go out and manipulate populations. We must rely on natural experiments and quasi-experimental settings because no institutional review board is going to sign off on me going and randomly killing animals at a large scale to see what happens! I read the literature and my training in economics and ecology allows me to connect the dots. When someone hears about vultures collapsing in India, they think, ‘oh that’s sad.’ I think ‘hold on, that’s an identification strategy.’ When someone hears about bats in the USA dying from this invasive fungus, they think, ‘well, I never really liked bats, so whatever.’ I think, ‘wait, this is the closest we’re going to get to test all of the predictions from ecology as well as the predictions from environmental economics as to what do people do when a natural input declines.’

Shivani: Are there any dream projects on the back burner for you?

Eyal: I have always wanted to study whales. They essentially fertilize the oceans – I will leave the graphic details to your imagination, but they consume a lot of biomass and as they discharge it over large scales in the ocean, they move nutrients from area to area which supports the rest of marine life. With whaling and more shipping activity, we risk destroying this source of nutrients to the oceans. The problem is that there’s not great data on location of whales, and there’s not great data on where and how they travel. I often joke that animals are the worst survey respondents because they have a zero percent response rate when you send a census form to them.

Shivani: Following that, and panning out to the global scenario of ecosystems, what is the most critical ecological disaster that’s happening to us right now that not all of us might be aware of?

Eyal: Habitat loss![1] Well-connected, pristine habitats are super important for the survival of biodiversity, and that is the resource that we are reducing and taking away from ecosystems. We need to focus on slowing down conversion of non-developed and untouched ecosystems and just let them be. And there are big discussions as to what that number is.

In his book, Half Earth, renowned ecologist EO Wilson argued that we should put away half of the Earth aside for nature. That’s going to be a tough sell in terms of a policy recommendation and so now the big slogan is 30 by 30: 30% of earth’s area should be protected by 2030, including both terrestrial and marine areas.

Shivani: Can you draw some parallels between climate urgency and ecological habitat loss?

Eyal: There are many parallels between climate change and biodiversity crises. When I started reading literature from ecology about declines in species, I kept looking – where is the number that shows what happens to the outcomes we care about when we lose a species, or when some biodiversity index declines by 10. And when I didn’t find it, I had this big a-ha moment! This is exactly where climate change literature was 10-20 years ago. We had climate scientists saying climate change is happening and it is going to be bad. There will be high, potentially catastrophic, costs to humanity and human well-being. Right now, we have ecologists saying biodiversity is in freefall, this will not be good for human well-being, and you should take this very seriously, but we still do not have the body of work in the social sciences that allows us to map that onto socioeconomic outcomes.

It took a decade or two for social scientists to build knowledge on how a 1-degree increase impacts our daily lives. And over time we understand that those costs are very nontrivial. We have had six reports by the IPCC. We have only had one report in 2019 by its equivalent body, the IPBES.

It is taking a longer time with ecosystems and biodiversity for a few reasons. One reason is that the urgency is more recent. Only now are we starting to get the same level of traction and attention for biodiversity losses as we do for climate change. The other reason comes to measurement and our ability to make inferences and understand what is going on in this domain. We still do not have an agreement about what is the correct way to measure biodiversity. Data on biodiversity is scarce, both at a spatial and temporal scale, and it is a lot more complicated. How do we even measure the decline? How do we identify and understand the channels through which it will have an impact on these outcomes? And it is just a bit more of an uphill battle to generate that knowledge.

Shivani: What impact do you see your work having in this sphere?

Eyal: I see my work trying to impact three major avenues. One is within economics and especially within environmental economics. I want to show that thinking about biodiversity and natural inputs is important, not just theoretically, but also empirically, and that we can quantify these costs and benefits of having less or more species using the same best practice techniques that we are using for other questions throughout applied economics.

The second conversation I want to have is with ecologists where they are focused on either work that is strictly theoretical or experimental in the lab or in the field (mostly observational). This in-between, quasi-experimental world does not exist in ecology, and I want to show them that the discipline of economics has developed tools to work with messy real-world applications and settings. Just because we do not necessarily think about measurement and inference in the same way does not mean that ecologists are wrong, but they are not able to have a conversation with economists because the tools and the techniques are just so different. So, I want my work to demonstrate to ecologists how they can use their amazing methods, datasets, and real-world experience and ability to do great field work and map it into this causal inference framework.

The third audience I want to be reading my work are policymakers. I want them to have something tangible to discuss in their discussions and be informed by actual numbers. Another way of phrasing it is that if we fail to quantify the costs and benefits of biodiversity, we are going to implicitly assume that they were zero. And there is always going to be some non-zero opportunity cost. I want my work to show that there is a cost. It is real, and here are the magnitudes. Here is also a way to apply these methods to be able to learn what those magnitudes are.

Shivani: What main barriers to action do you think about when presenting your work to policymakers?

Eyal: To be honest, I do not interact daily with policymakers. My incentives right now are really to have a conversation within academia and to get the stamp of approval that I am generating good and useful knowledge that is moving my discipline forward. Once I have that, then policymakers, when they want to talk to someone who is an expert on the Endangered Species Act or is an expert about the value of a bat, conservation or wolf or a scavenger, when they search that, my name will pop up and then we will talk.

Shivani: How do you see the future looking like for non-human beings?

Eyal: Hmm, what is the vision of a world where we have found some equilibrium between society and nature? I do not have an amazing answer to this. It is mostly about just us recognizing that there is importance and value in preserving ecosystems as well as preserving, perhaps more importantly, ecological corridors so that species can move and migrate and adapt to climate change.

Shivani: Talking of human and nonhuman interactions, as you are working with these agents that we do not see having agency in the real world, has anything changed with your own interactions with non-human beings?

Eyal: For a long time, people have placed value on different species, mostly on how charismatic, fuzzy, and cute they are, like polar bears or panda bears.. I cannot fully articulate why I care so much about them or what kind of benefit I derive from their existence, but I know it is a non-zero benefit. That intrinsic value ought to grow as societies become richer because our willingness to pay for preservation of nature and species becomes higher as we become richer.

The problem is that we do not have a good way to quantify and estimate existence values. I know I care about polar bears. Do I care about them at a $1.00 value, $5 value, $500.00 value? I do not know, and I also don’t really know who is going to ask me to write a check to preserve polar bears. There is not a readily available institution that is going to collect it. A vision we can hope for in the future is that we have some functioning form of payment for ecosystem services where we are able to collect funds from people to preserve biodiversity and ecosystems, which then truly reveals their preferences and how much they are willing to pay to deter negative detrimental impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Shivani: Could you share a hobby outside of work? After the rigorous research you put out, how do you decompress from thinking about planetary problems?

Eyal: Since I was a kid, I really enjoyed going out and spending time in nature, not necessarily doing something highly active. Just going out hiking or camping and spending time out in the woods, out in the desert, by a river, by a lake has always brought me a lot of peace of mind and tranquility. So, I very much enjoyed that about the USA.

Another habit I picked up during graduate school is having physical exercise be a routine, because it is something quite different than the skills that I use in my day-to-day work, sitting frustrated in front of my computer screen. It makes me feel good about not neglecting my health in a way that will lead to a very awkward conversation with a physician in a few years.

Shivani: With this, I am at the end of my formal set of questions, and I would like to thank you for joining us. As for leaving words, would you want to share with us a book, movie, or documentary that you recommend? I remember you were talking about Princess Mononoke the other day.

Eyal: As I am becoming older, I am getting increasingly less comfortable mentioning how big of an impact Princess Mononoke had on me. The ability of that movie to articulate how complicated it is to decide the optimal boundary between nature and human progress and economic development, and how there are no necessarily classic villains in that story nor is there a classic good agent. That made me really interested in wanting to be here. That’s the conflict. That’s the friction. That’s the dimension and the border where I want to work at and try to contribute to. If any of the readers have not watched Princess Mononoke, I recommend you clear your weekend plans and find where you can stream it online.

A still from Princess Mononoke. Source: Flickr.

I recently watched a fantastic documentary called Fish and Men which is an impactful examination of the regulation and how marine fisheries are managed in the USA. Two books that I really like are by Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker). One is on climate change (Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future), one is on the which is colloquially referred to as The Sixth Extinction, these massive declining biodiversity losses. I really like her writing because she does an excellent job of diving into a specific story and then backing out and talking about the big picture.

Shivani: Thank you, Professor Frank, for your time with us today and for sharing your insights, research, and your thoughts on the global ecological order.

Eyal: Happy to. Thank you for having me.

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[1] Habitat loss refers to the reduction in the amount of space where a particular species, or group of species can survive and reproduce.