Earth Economy is based on the wealth of Species.
We live on top of other species contributions and we only survive based upon their incredible rich diversity and multiplicity and selfless services.
Yet we don’t value them.
We take them all for granted.
Something you lose is only when you understand and Love.
We are approaching that very point now… The losing – not the valuing.
A geneticist once said that without the other species support – humans will not even have air to breath…
How True.
What is Constant in our Economic models though is that speciation is never taken into a Costing accounts basis.
Never.
The great Earth Economy – that is – is discounted to ZERO.
When the overall value of the Banker-Wankers is estimated to thirty trillion.
Skewed, No?
Still today the economic case for global action to stop the destruction of the natural world is lost behind the various cyclical crises.
Yet it is even more powerful than the argument for tackling climate change, a major report for the United Nations declares this summer.
The Stern report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.
The UN’s biodiversity report, is expected to say that the value of saving “natural goods and services”, such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher and around more than 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.
On the UN’s International Day for Biological Diversity last week, a warning that “the diversity of life, so crucial to our security, health, wealth and wellbeing is being eroded has been circulated widely, throughout the United Kingdom.
The UN report’s authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.
“We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within,” said the report’s author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.
The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives.
The vast Earth economy damage currently being inflicted on the natural world comprises a landscape of constant market failures.
The report will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run so that it factors in the value of the natural world. In future, it says, communities should be paid for conserving nature rather than using it; companies given stricter limits on what they can take from the environment and fined or taxed more to limit over-exploitation; subsidies worth more than US$1tn (£696.5bn) a year for industries like agriculture, fisheries, energy and transport reformed; and businesses and national governments asked to publish accounts for their use of natural and human capital alongside their financial results.
And the potential economic benefits are huge. Setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas would cost $45 bn a year globally, according to one estimate, but the benefits of preserving the species richness within these zones would be worth $4-5 tn a year.
The report follows a series of recent studies showing that the world is in the grip of a mass extinction event as pollution, climate change, development and hunting destroys habitats of all types, from rainforests and wetlands to coastal mangroves and open heathland. However, only two of the world’s 100 biggest companies believe reducing biodiversity is a strategic threat to their business, according to another report released tomorrow by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers Accountants, which is advising the team compiling the UN report.
“Sometimes people describe Earth’s economy as a spaceship economy because we are basically isolated, we do have limits to how much we can extract, and why and where,” said economist Pavan Sukhdev, who visited and spoke at the LSE in London, on behalf of the Environmental Parliament.
When He met the Friends of the Environmental Parliament, he addressed the issue as Critical and said that Intensive Care for species is needed to avoid Despeciation, something we have been saying all along for the last twenty years at least…
Anything changed?
No, nothing. Not for the positive that is…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
The United Nations report shows that on average one third of Earth’s habitats have been damaged by humans – but the problem ranges from zero percent of ice, rock and polar lands to 85% of seas and oceans and more than 70% of Mediterranean shrubland. It also warns that in spite of growing awareness of the dangers, destruction of nature will “still continue on a large scale”. The International Union for the Conservationof Nature has previously estimated that species are becoming extinct at an astonishing extinction rate – 10,000 times higher – than it would be the natural attrition rate.
That is without humans to speed up things…
