There are things the economy struggles to price, precisely because it can’t replace them. A forest left standing, untouched by destructive fires. A seagrass meadow quietly growing on the seafloor, protecting the coastline. A wetland that holds water, a pollinator doing its job without ever issuing an invoice.
And yet, a mountain ecosystem is worth millions without a single tree being cut. A sea “produces” wealth without a single kilo of fish reaching market. A wetland offers services of immense value to a city without ever appearing anywhere as an asset. This is the economic value of nature, invisible for decades. Now, there’s an effort to put numbers on it.
For years, Europe has been searching for ways to recognize and value ecosystem services, from carbon storage and water retention to coastal protection and biodiversity conservation, with a dual goal: making that value visible, and creating new financing tools, including private-sector participation, to protect it.
The needs are enormous. The financing gap for biodiversity conservation in the European Union is estimated at around $40 billion a year. Public funds can’t carry that weight alone. So investors, businesses, and new financing mechanisms are entering a conversation that, until recently, seemed unthinkable.
Can nature generate economic value that translates into funding for its own protection? From Brussels to the forests of Pindos and the depths of the Aegean, the challenge is finding the right balance, letting nature acquire economic value without a price tag for sale.
Seagrass as Natural Capital
The European Commission is working along these same lines, developing so-called “nature credits.” The concept is simple: a proven improvement to an ecosystem can be measured, certified, and given economic value, drawing in private capital to complement public funding. In July 2025, the Commission unveiled its Roadmap for Nature Credits and set up an expert group, which includes Greece’s The GreenTank, to examine the rules needed for a credible market to function.
Underwater Posidonia seagrass meadows in the Aegean, and the Mediterranean more broadly, are a telling example of this new economic lens on nature. Restoring them could generate credits that companies or investors could purchase to boost their green credentials, with the proceeds flowing back into the ecosystem itself to fund further restoration work.
The logic echoes the carbon emissions trading market, but it’s still far from a comparably mature system. There is currently no European Nature Credits market. Building one will require common methodologies, reliable data, strict monitoring, and independent verification, to ensure a credit corresponds to a real, additional benefit for nature rather than becoming just another greenwashing tool.
At the center of the effort to translate ecological improvement into measurable value is the European ARTEMIS project. With the participation of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) and GreenTank, the project examines, among other things, how restoring Posidonia seagrass meadows can be linked to a credible monitoring and verification system, and ultimately, to new financing tools.
Posidonia meadows protect coastlines, host biodiversity, and store carbon, while also supporting recreation and economic activity. The value of the services they provide globally has been estimated at roughly €5.57 trillion annually. The cost of their destruction is similarly steep.
The loss of carbon stored in seagrass meadows has been estimated to carry a social cost of around €184 billion. Posidonia already provides services the economy would have to pay dearly to replace. The challenge is finding a way to turn that value into a “credit” and generate investment interest in protecting it.
From the Sea to the Forests of Pindos
The same question arises, in different terms, in Vovousa, in the heart of northern Pindos. How much is a forest worth beyond the timber it can produce? Answering that requires first documenting and valuing the services the ecosystem itself provides. That’s the aim of the research project “Multifunctional Management of Forest Ecosystems for the Vovousa Community Forest,” coordinated by the Hellenic Society for the Environment and Culture (ELLET), with the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as scientific partners.
The goal is to document, using scientific data, the full range of ecosystem services the forest provides, from biodiversity, carbon storage, and soil and water protection to recreation and its contribution to the local economy. This is where the concept of multifunctional management comes in. The forest isn’t treated solely as a timber reserve, but as natural capital that can support both the local economy and ecosystem protection at the same time.
As Ioannis Mitsopoulos, assistant professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s Department of Forestry and Natural Environment, explains, timber production can continue on sustainable terms while local processing and ecotourism are strengthened in parallel.
At the same time, the door opens to new financing tools, from voluntary carbon agreements and biodiversity credits to watershed protection contracts, corporate restoration financing, agri-environmental and forest-environmental programs, and nature-based protection and management measures.
Here too, the goal is for the economic value the forest generates not to be extracted from it, but to flow back into its protection and management, and ultimately, into the local community itself. That’s why the project isn’t concluding with a binding management study, but with a model proposal for multifunctional management that could serve as a guide for other mountain communities as well.
As Lydia Karra, president of the ELLET, explains, the goal is to highlight additional development opportunities that could help residents stay in their communities and attract newcomers. Interest, she notes, is already substantial, as many forest communities have requested that the program be applied in their own areas.
Vovousa thus functions as another experiment around the same difficult question posed by Posidonia. Can nature be given economic value without becoming a commodity? The answer will depend on whether the economic value recognized in its services can flow back to it, funding its own protection.
