Rapid loss of Nature is ' hurting global poor'
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Rapid loss of Nature is ' hurting global poor'*
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Damage to forests, rivers, marine life and other aspects of nature could
halve living standards for the world's poor, a major report has concluded.
Current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by about 7% by
2050.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) review is modelled
on the Stern Review of climate change.
It will be released at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
meeting in Bonn, where 60 leaders have pledged to halt deforestation by
2020.
"You come up with answers like 6% or 8% of global GDP when you think
about the benefits of intact ecosystems, for example in controlling
water, controlling floods and droughts, the flow of nutrients from
forest to field," said the project's leader Pavan Sukhdev.
"But then you realise that the major beneficiaries [of nature] are the
billion and a half of the world's poor; these natural systems account
for as much as 40%-50% of what we define as the 'GDP of the poor'," he
told BBC News.
Globalised decline
The TEEB review was set up by the German government and the European
Commission during the German G8 presidency.
The two institutions selected Mr Sukhdev, a managing director in the
global markets division at Deutsche Bank, to lead it.
At the time, in an article for the BBC News website, Germany's
environment minister Sigmar Gabriel wrote: "Biological diversity
constitutes the indispensable foundation for our lives and for global
economic development.
Sigmar Gabriel: Why cost nature?
"[But] two-thirds of these ecosystem services are already in decline,
some dramatically. We need a greening of globalisation."
The document to be released at the CBD is an interim report into what
the team acknowledges are complex, difficult and under-researched issues.
The 7% figure is largely based on loss of forests. The report will
acknowledge that the costs of losing some ecosystems have barely been
quantified.
The trends are understood well enough - a 50% shrinkage of wetlands over
the past 100 years, a rate of species loss between 100 and 1,000 times
the rate that would occur without 6.5 billion humans on the planet, a
sharp decline in ocean fish stocks and one third of coral reefs damaged.
However, putting a monetary value on them is probably much more
difficult, the team acknowledges, than putting a cost on climate change.
The report highlights some of the planet's ecologically damaged zones
such as Haiti, where heavy deforestation - largely caused by the poor as
they cut wood to sell for cash - means soil is washed away and the
ground much less productive.
'Too little, too late'
There are some indications that biodiversity and ecosystem issues are
now being heard at the top tables of politics.
G8 environment ministers meeting in Japan last weekend agreed a document
noting that "biodiversity is the basis of human security and... the loss
of biodiversity exacerbates inequality and instability in human society".
Hunger demonstration, Cambodia. Image: AP
Ecosystem damage is likely to reduce food supplies in vulnerable areas
It also emphasised the importance of protected areas and of curbing
deforestation.
At the CBD on Wednesday, 60 countries signed pledges to halt net
deforestation by 2020.
But the main CBD target agreed by all signatories at the Rio de Janeiro
Earth Summit in 1992 - to "halt and begin to reverse" biodiversity loss
by 2010 - is very unlikely to be met.
An early draft of the TEEB review, seen by BBC News, concluded: "Lessons
from the last 100 years demonstrate that mankind has usually acted too
little and too late in the face of similar threats - asbestos, CFCs,
acid rain, declining fisheries, BSE and - most recently - climate change".
The Stern Review talked to governments in a way that earlier climate
reports could not, because it was written by and for economists; and the
architects of TEEB hope it will eventually do the same thing for
biodiversity.