In this episode of VoxDevTalks, Tim Phillips interviews Eyal Frank from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, an economist working at the intersection of economics and conservation. Frank discusses how economic thinking has traditionally neglected natural habitats and biodiversity, treating them as external to economic systems.
“In a lot of cases, when we think about economic development, it comes at the expense of habitats or environmental conditions that are important for the survival of species.”
Economists have often assumed that human-made substitutes can replace natural functions, leading to insufficient attention to what ecologists call the biodiversity crisis. Frank’s research seeks to quantify the real-world impacts of biodiversity loss using economic tools, data analysis, and causal inference.