Saturday, October 2, 2010

Five Trillion dollars a year

I think we will see an increasing number of articles like this in the run up to the latest Convention on Biodiversity meeting in Japan later this month. This article is from a Sunday Newspaper in England.

"British scientific experts have made a major breakthrough in the fight to save the natural world from destruction, leading to an international effort to safeguard a global system worth at least $5 trillion a year to mankind.
Groundbreaking new research by a former banker, Pavan Sukhdev, to place a price tag on the worldwide network of environmental assets has triggered an international race to halt the destruction of rainforests, wetlands and coral reefs.
With experts warning that the battle to stem the loss of biodiversity is two decades behind the climate change agenda, the United Nations, the World Bank and ministers from almost every government insist no country can afford to believe it will be unaffected by the alarming rate at which species are disappearing. The Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan, later this month will shift from solely ecological concerns to a hard-headed assessment of the impact on global economic security."
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"Biodiversity is where climate change was 20 years ago – people are still trying to understand what it means and its significance. Things that we thought nature provides for free, actually if you lose them, cost money."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

sad when people think of saving the planet as saving their bank account rather than saving themselves and their childrens home.

Lauren Argue said...

It is unfortunate that it has come to a matter of economics being the reasoning for conserving the planet. Though, I do believe that this "TEEB" project will make an impact on people.

When people talk about global issues and how important it is to start changing our current ways of living, people's first and automatic response is to turn their heads rather than listen. The problems seem to big, and EXPENSIVE to start fixing. No one wants to contribute their money to a project that does not have guaranteed results. However, this project will gain contributions when people are presented with the fact that by not helping out NOW, they will be forced to spend an even greater amount to keep the planet a livable place that will sustain human life later.

-Lauren Argue