How do you put a price on the value of nature? That’s the question Indian banker Pavan Sukhdev and his colleagues are seeking to answer in their international project on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), which published its latest report last month. The challenge, as Sukhdev sees it, is how to address the “economic invisibility of nature,” which allows the economic value of ecosystems to be ignored by governments and businesses.
Over the past 50 years, 60 percent of all ecosystem services have declined as a direct result of the conversion of land to the production of foods, fuels and fibers.
"This should come as no surprise," say seven of the world's leading environmental scientists, who met to collectively to study the pitfalls of utilizing markets to induce people to take account of the environmental costs of their behavior and solutions. "We are getting what we pay for."
In Pakistan, environmental degradation is both a cause and consequence of different socio-economic problems including deepening poverty, declining performance of different crops and worsening problems with human and crop diseases.
Environmentalists say that a fragile and damaged resource base is a key cause of rising poverty. Degraded land affects agricultural yields and forest resources are mindlessly exploited, reducing the ability of millions of poor people to earn livelihoods from them.
But the poor have no option but to overuse rapidly depleting resources.
This paper discusses the public sector's role in PES internationally. In general, the public sector's role in ecosystem services markets is both critical, and evolving. The public sector roles are evolving in three distinct ways:
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has approvoved the first four projects to access incentive funds available for sustainable forest management (SFM) and REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, as well as conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of carbon stock) under the GEF Incentive Mechanism for Forests.
THE HAGUE, Jul 5, 2011 (IPS) - Avoiding the coming catastrophic nexus of climate change, food, water and energy shortages, along with worsening poverty, requires a global technological overhaul involving investments of 1.9 trillion dollars each year for the next 40 years, said experts from the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) in Geneva Tuesday.
Indigenous people like Uganda’s Bunyoro-Kitara tend to take good care of their land – and to lose big when someone else finds natural resources on it. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) offer a way to profit from good stewardship, but only if governments keep things clean. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
