The costs of protecting Earth's biodiversity and ecosystems are in many cases significantly less than the economic benefits derived from protecting them, a United Nations report is expected to conclude later this year.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study, commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is slated for publication at the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Japan this October, in recognition of the UN's declaration of 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. On Saturday, the Guardian newspaper in England quoted the report's author, Paven Sukhdev, as arguing that a major complicating factor in attempting to stem the loss of species and habitats is the failure to ascribe economic values to their preservation:
"We fail to recognise the extent to which we are dependent on natural ecosystems, and not just for goods and services, but also for the stability of the environment in which we survive - there's an element of resilience that's been built into our lives, the ability of our environment to withstand the shocks to which we expose it...the more we lose, the less resilience there is to these shocks, and therefore we increase the risk to society and risk to life and livelihoods and the economy."
According to the Guardian, Sukhdev is expected to make recommendations for how to use economic values for different parts of nature as ways for protecting them:
One of the most immediate changes could be reform of direct and indirect subsidies, such as tax exemptions, which encourage over-production even when there is clear destruction of the long-term ability of the environment to provide what is needed, and below-cost pricing which leads to wasteful use and poor understanding of the value of the products. "Particularly worrying" are about $300bn of subsidies to agriculture and fishing; subsidies of $500bn for energy, $238-$306bn for transport and $67bn for water companies are also singled out.
At a press conference last week to preview some sections of the report, UNEP focused particularly on the economics of the commercial fishing industry. At present, the fishing industry receives approximately $27 billion in subsidies every year, much of which is directed to maintaining or increasing the capacity of fishing fleets, even though current global capacity is between 1.8 and 2.8 times what is needed. Partly as a consequence, only around 25 percent of commercial stocks are considered to be in a healthy or relatively healthy state, and on current trends some researchers have predicted that virtually all commercial fish stocks will collapse by 2050.
UNEP claims that by phasing down or phasing out many of these subsidies, the excess capacity in the world's fishing fleets could be dramatically reduced, and some of the money saved could be redirected toward training and supporting fishworkers in alternative livelihoods. The result, the organization says, would be an increase in total catches, profits, and fishworkers' income, even as the pressure on vulnerable and depleted stocks would be eased.
Image: Konstantin Tkachenko/Marine Photobank
Tags: Biodiversity, Conservation
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