Putting a value on it

A report released this week at the 9th UN Conference on Biological Diversity (COP9) in Bonn, Germany, calculated that environmental damage and species loss costs $2.1 to $4.8 trillion every year. The study, commissioned by the European Union (EU) and the German government, is the biggest assessment ever made of the economic impact of ecological damage. But establishing the global value of biodiversity was not the main focus of the study. As is the case with global warming, it is the poor, particularly those in developing and emerging economies, who stand to suffer the most from the loss of ecosystem services.