guardian.co.uk,
Fiona Harvey in Jakarta, Friday 20 January 2012
 |
| A farmer walks with an ox-drawn cart - Webuye district, Kenya. Many of the benefits of conservation, so-called 'ecosystem services', are invisible. Photograph: Jake Lyell/Alamy |
Some of the
world's poorest people would be half a trillion dollars a year better off if
the services they provide to the rest of the planet indirectly – through
conserving natural habitats – was given an economic value, a new study has
found.
Many of
these valuable habitats and species are under threat, but the people who live
in these areas lack the means to improve their conservation, according to a new study in the journal BioScience.
If poor people were paid for the services they provide in preserving some of the
world's key biodiversity hotspots, they could reap $500bn. There are some
fledgling schemes that could help to raise this cash – for instance, the United
Nations-backed system called Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
forest Degradation), which uses carbon trading to generate cash to preserve
trees – but so far they are small in scale.
The
benefits of safeguarding these habitats, such as providing valuable services
from food, medicines and clean water to absorbing carbon dioxide from the air,
are more than triple the costs of conserving them, the researchers found.
Will
Turner, vice–president of Conservation International and lead author of the
study, said: "Developed and developing economies cannot continue to ask
the world's poor to shoulder the burden of protecting these globally important
ecosystem services for the rest of the world's benefit, without compensation in
return. This is exactly what we mean when we talk about valuing natural
capital. Nature may not send us a bill, but its essential services and flows,
both direct and indirect, have concrete economic value."
He said
that preserving areas of highest biodiversity should be the priority.
"What the research clearly tells us is that conserving the world's
remaining biodiversity isn't just a moral imperative - it is a necessary
investment for lasting economic development. But in many places where the poor
depend on these natural services, we are dangerously close to exhausting them,
resulting in lasting poverty," said Turner.
Many of the
benefits of conservation, so-called "ecosystem services", are
invisible – for instance, maintaining wooded land can help to prevent mudslides
during heavy rainfall, and provides valuable watersheds that keep rivers
healthy and provide clean drinking water, as well as absorbing carbon dioxide
from the air. These benefits are not assigned an economic value, however, so
that chopping down trees or destroying habitats appears to deliver an instant
economic return, when in fact it is leading to economic losses that are only
obvious when it is too late.
The study,
entitled Global Biodiversity Conservation and the Alleviation of Poverty, was
led by a team from Conservation International, and co-authored by scientists at
NatureServe, the US National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They looked in particular at 17 of the world's most
important areas for biodiversity.
They found
that some of the ecosystem services accrued to the local people themselves –
for instance, using forests as sources of food, medicines and shelter – while
the rest are regional or global.
The study
follows on a growing body of work from the past decade that has sought to place a value on ecosystem services, as a way of ensuring that they are accounted for
in economic policy. If nature is not economically valued, many scientists have
argued, it is more prone to being destroyed.
Russell
Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and a co-author, said:
"We have always known that biodiversity is foundational to human
wellbeing, but we now have a strong case that ecosystems specifically located
in the world's biodiversity hotspots and high-biodiversity wilderness areas
also provide a vital safety net for people living in poverty. Protecting these
places is essential not only to safeguard life on earth but also to support the
impoverished, ensure continued broad access to nature's services, and meet the
UN millennium development goals."
He called
on governments to integrate the conservation of nature into economic and
poverty-alleviation policies, in order to value these services better.
No comments:
Post a Comment