The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet.... Mark Lynas

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СКАЧАТЬ and stable an ecosystem can be. The same, of course, applies to the biosphere as a whole. We are only just beginning to realise all the myriad ways that different species act unconsciously together to keep this planet habitable and its climate tolerable. Might there be some kind of global ‘tipping point’ – like the ones that were passed in the Newfoundland cod fishery and the Caribbean coral reefs – where some kind of irreversible global ecosystem shift takes place? This is the possibility that the planetary boundary on biodiversity is intended to prevent: it is now absolutely clear that the Earth’s living biosphere depends fundamentally on the maintenance of a broad level of species diversity. If the Sixth Mass Extinction is allowed to continue – or still worse, accelerate further – then the chance of a global-scale ecosystem collapse can only continue to grow. the price of pandas

      The current crisis in biodiversity tells us loud and clear that conventional approaches to conservation have failed. ‘Paper parks’ – named but barely protected – in developing countries are routinely violated by poachers and loggers. What areas are set aside for nature reserves are too small and too fragmented. At sea fishermen compete with each other in a global race to the bottom, knowing that if they do not catch the last bluefin tuna, someone else will. No wonder the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report is full of ominous words and phrases like ‘serious declines’, ‘extensive fragmentation and degradation’, ‘overexploitation’ and ‘dangerous impacts’. To meet the planetary boundary, we need to make urgent changes in policy.

      Biodiversity loss is fundamentally an enormous market failure, because the people that profit from destroying biodiversity are not generally the same people who lose out when the rainforests, mangroves and coral reefs are finally gone. When palm-oil companies move into the last remnants of rainforest in Borneo, the biofuels they sell deliver benefits to shareholders and foreign consumers, but local people are the losers, as are all the rest of us because of the destructive impact on the world’s climate and ecosystems. Our chief task today is to design systems that value nature in a direct and marketable sense and deliver hard cash to those who are in a position to protect ecosystems in a reasonably intact state. What is needed is not more moralising, but more money.

      This kind of talk makes many environmentalists queasy. Greens generally view biodiversity conservation as a moral cause, and any discussion of financial mechanisms and marketing schemes arouses strong and principled opposition. Why should any other species, each with just as much right to occupy this living Earth as us, be forced to ‘pay its way’? This objection is understandable but wrong-headed: what I am proposing is not a liquidation of nature to make money, but using money simply as a convenient means to safeguard its protection. Money is a measure of value: put a price on wild animals and plants and we will put a value on them too. This is a pragmatic strategy, only to be used in desperation because the others have failed.

      But how can the value of natural systems be quantified, let alone brought into the market? A possible approach is to try to assign an imputed shadow price to the ecosystem services – fresh water, clean air, recreational benefits and so on – that different habitats deliver. One study suggests a value of $200,700 per square kilometre for ‘high-biodiversity wilderness areas’, whilst another finds that ‘endemic bird areas’ might be worth $88,710 per square kilometre.⁴⁶ The imputed value of coral reefs – as destinations for tourism, nurseries for commercially valuable fish and shoreline protectors against storms, for example – has ranged from $100,000 to $600,000 per square kilometre.⁴⁷ The values of individual species have also been quantified, based on estimates from public surveys of ‘willingness to pay’ to prevent their elimination. Using this methodology (and in 2005 US dollars) the Eurasian red squirrel is worth $2.87; the California sea otter $36.76; the giant panda $13.81; the Mediterranean monk seal (almost extinct): $17.54; the blue whale: $44.57; the brown hare: $0.00; the Asian elephant: $1.94; the Northern spotted owl: $59.43; and the loggerhead sea turtle: $16.98.⁴⁸

      One team of scientists, led by Robert Costanza – a member of the planetary boundaries expert group – even went so far as to publish an aggregate monetary value of the whole biosphere. There is a conceptual flaw in this, as many have pointed out, because the human economy is a subset of the natural biosphere and could not in any conceivable way replace it. As one environmental scientist sniffed: when it comes to pricing the biosphere as a whole, ‘there is little that can usefully be done with a serious underestimate of infinity.’⁴⁹ Even so, Costanza and colleagues came up with a precise figure for ‘the total economic value of the planet’ of $33 trillion per year (as compared with a total global GNP of, when the paper was written in 1997, $18 trillion).⁵⁰

      The problem with these figures however is not that they are too precise but that they are not real. No one pays anyone else $33 trillion a year to protect the planet from destruction, nor are any of us actually forking out $17.54 to keep Mediterranean monk seals from going extinct. Yet in a globalised capitalist economy actual, real-world revenue flows are essential if they are to compete with the commercial drive that is destroying and displacing the remaining bits of natural ecosystem worldwide. Mangroves may be valuable as protection against storms and shelter for fish, but someone needs to be paid to look after them if they are not to be chopped down to make way for lucrative shrimp farms. In other words, a financial constituency needs to be created that has a vested interest in protecting its assets – assets that are, in this case, natural rather than commercial capital.

      The starting point for this process has to be valuing natural capital. As Pavan Sukhdev, lead author of the 2010 The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity (TEEB) report, is fond of saying: ‘You cannot manage what you do not measure.’ One of the report’s key recommendations is that the present system of national accounts should be ‘rapidly upgraded to include the value of changes in natural capital stocks and ecosystem service flows’. The TEEB report consciously encourages the use of banking and accounting terminology with regard to biodiversity: its authors have launched a ‘Bank of Natural Capital’ website to encourage wider awareness of the ideas it raises. This even extends to proposing an ‘internal rate of return’ for ecosystems, which varies from 40 per cent for woodlands to 50 per cent for tropical forests to 79 per cent for better-managed grasslands.⁵¹ ‘The flows of ecosystem services can be seen as the “dividend” that society receives from natural capital,’ the TEEB Synthesis Report suggests.⁵²

      If this all sounds rather capitalistic, it is worth noting that the biggest losers from the current largely unregulated and unquantified degradation of natural capital are the world’s poor. The TEEB report stresses that forests and other natural ecosystems make an enormous contribution to the so-called ‘GDP of the poor’ (up to 90 per cent) and that conservation efforts can therefore directly contribute to poverty reduction. In contrast, one estimate of the ‘environmental externalities’ (the off-balance sheet costs offloaded onto the environment) of the world’s top 3,000 listed companies totals around $2.2 trillion annually.⁵³ All of this value is going into the pockets of corporate shareholders, where it is unlikely to benefit the poor. Moreover, insisting that natural systems are priceless, as many campaigners do, is in practice akin to setting their effective price at zero. The language and practices of economics may offer the strongest tools today for use in nature conservation.

      But these imputed values need to be translated into real monetary worth if the natural assets that generate them are to be properly protected. One of the most promising ways of doing this is known as ‘payments for ecosystem services’ – designing revenue streams that go to communities and landowners who need to be persuaded to keep wetlands and forests intact. In Mexico the annual rate of deforestation has been halved since a 2003 law allowed a СКАЧАТЬ