Estimating economic impacts of bat loss on agriculture

Picture of a bat with a white nose. — Little brown bat in Avery County, NC with white-nose syndrome. Photo by Gabrielle Graeter, NC Wildlife Resources Commission, CC BY 2.0.

I was in Knoxville back in November meeting with faculty at the University of Tennessee. Dale Manning and I were chatting about economic valuation of ecosystem services and he told me about a very cool paper looking at impacts of bat losses on agricultural land rental rates. They used white-nose syndrome as a natural experiment to estimate an economic impact of bats. They looked at what happened to land rental rates when white-nose hit a county, greatly reducing the bat population, compared to what happened in other counties that didn’t have white-nose.

They found that “the loss of bats in a county causes land rental rates to fall by $2.84 per acre plus $1.50 per acre per neighboring county with WNS. Agricultural land falls by 1,102 acres plus 582 acres per neighboring county with WNS. As of 2017, agricultural losses from WNS were between $426 and $495 million per year.”