As Carl Zimmer explains in the New York Times, much of the increase comes from a better understanding of just how valuable some of these ecological services are. "Coral reefs, for instance, have proved to be much more important for storm protection than previously recognized," he writes. "They also protect against soil erosion by weakening waves before they reach land. As a result, Dr. Costanza and his colleagues now consider the services provided by coral reefs to be 42 times more valuable than they did in 1997. They estimate that each acre of reef provides $995,000 in services each year for a total of $11 trillion worldwide."

But, unfortunately, Constanza's update was necessitated not only by improved data, but because the size of our ecological resources has diminished so greatly over the past decade and a half. Costanza and his colleagues wanted to know the value of that depletion. Zimmer writes:

But they also had to take into account the fact that many ecosystems have suffered since 1997. Many coral reefs, for example, have been dying off because of pollution and other human activities. Dr. Costanza and his colleagues estimate that the world’s reefs shrank from 240,000 square miles in 1997 to 108,000 in 2011. If coral reefs and other ecosystems were still as healthy as they were in 1997, the value of their services today would have been considerably higher: $165.8 trillion. In other words, deforestation and other damage we’ve inflicted on the natural world has wiped out $23 trillion a year in ecosystem services. To put that loss into perspective, consider that the gross domestic product of the United States is $16.2 trillion.

At best, the $142.7 figure is a rough estimate, but this follow-up work is a good demonstration of why honing in on that number, even roughly, is so important: Understanding what we have makes us more able to understand what we're losing.