The annual cost of global damage to the natural environment has been put at $4,500 billion. This is greater than the annual cost of coping with the financial crisis, according to a European Commission-backed study group.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) puts a value on forests, wetlands, grasslands and ocean habitats, and then costs the damage to, or loss of, this ‘natural capital’. They launched their findings at the 10th meeting of signatories (COP10) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity held in Nagoya, Japan this week.
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/1359&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en
Pavan Sukhdev, a former banker who leads the programme, said his team measures ‘the multi-trillion dollar importance to the global economy of the natural world’, including forests, which it calls ‘the GDP of the poor’, coral reefs, ocean habitats, wetlands, rivers and even the value of pollinating insects.
He called for ‘a new era in which the value of nature’s services is made visible and becomes an explicit part of policy and business decision-making.’ The report suggests that in future, national measures of GDP and company accounts, should include these costs, which would ‘reset the economic compass’.
‘The time for ignoring biodiversity and persisting with conventional thinking regarding wealth creation and development is over. We must get on to the path towards a green economy,’ Sukhdev stated.
Unfortunately, governments and corporations are heading in the opposite direction. In Britain, Osborne’s Comprehensive Spending Review, launched on the same day as the TEEB report, specifically attacked measures to support bio-diversity. The Con-Lib Coalition has removed up to £1bn a year by 2014-15 from the development of green energy and other initiatives, by putting income from the Carbon Tax into reducing the deficit instead.
Environmental Stewardship schemes that pay farmers to support bio-diversity have been cut. The 20% budget cut for Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will lead to funding cuts and possible privatisation for England’s 224 National Parks and for the botanical gardens at Kew.
Globally, the economic crisis is driving reckless and uncontrolled destruction of habitats. Oil drilling in deep water causes constant leakage; tar sand extraction wrecks forests and rivers; the extraction of uranium for the new generation of nuclear power stations is poisoning land, animals and people. Far from ‘internalising’ these ‘externalities’, the corporations do everything they can to avoid taking responsibility, and paying.
However, the work of TEEB is extremely important in looking to the future, beyond capitalism. This kind of economic management will support new concepts of growth that include the costs of extraction and of recycling products at the end of their (very much extended) useful life. Such concepts of course will exclude the capitalist premise that shareholder profit is the sole measure of success.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label biodiversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biodiversity. Show all posts
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Biodiversity loss threatens us all
Almost 500 animals and plants have become extinct in England, and almost all within the last two centuries, a period which coincides with industrialisation and the merciless exploitation of the environment for profit.
A new report from Natural England highlights how habitat loss, inappropriate land management, environmental pollution and pressure from non-native species have all played a part in the erosion of England’s biodiversity.
All of the major groups of flora and fauna have experienced losses, with butterflies, amphibians, and many plant and other insect species being particularly hard hit – in some groups up to a quarter of species have been become extinct since 1800.
The report also lists nearly 1,000 native species whose survival is under severe threat today, and scientists working for Natural England fear that a tipping point has now been reached where the rate of extinction has outstripped evolution’s ability to generate new species:
“Although changes in species populations are a natural consequence of environmental change, recent technological advances have led to humans altering species’ habitats in ways and at rates that make it impossible for them to adapt. This has led to the decline and loss of many of England’s native species, losses that matter both for the intrinsic value of the species themselves, and because they are associated with damage to our natural environment.”
Or as Helen Phillips, Natural England’s Chief Executive put it: "Each species has a role and, like the rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost."
The outcome of the past 30 years of globalisation, actively promoted by governments as the only possible way for humanity to live, is the marketisation of increasing areas of the planet. No land, habitat or species has any value to capitalism unless it can be transformed into profit.
And we can easily track this accelerating attack on bio-diversity by looking at how, as industrial production has migrated to Asia, so the rate of extinctions there has increased. Our closest ancestors are being wiped out, with more than 70% of primates now on the “Red List” of endangered species. Over half of all mammals are under threat globally.
This shows that the profit-driven capitalist market operates in ways which are the direct opposite of the evolutionary process first described by Charles Darwin. His phrase “survival of the fittest” is often wrongly connected to the notion that greed is good and the strongest will survive.
But in fact natural evolution works in favour of diversity and not in favour of reduction to the most powerful. “Fittest” in Darwin’s conception equals not physically strongest, but best adapted. In periods when our planet has provided ideal conditions for great evolutionary surges, species evolved to populate every nook and cranny, every biological niche, on land and sea, with a staggering diversity.
Darwin explains in On the Origins of Species “how plants and animals remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations” and he adds that he uses the term “struggle for existence” in a large and metaphorical sense, “including dependence of one being on another”.
Unless human society begins urgently to use all its great scientific knowledge to reinstate, or finds ways of reproducing, this interdependence and co-operation between species, we risk not only the future of what the old religion called “lesser species”, but our own survival.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
A new report from Natural England highlights how habitat loss, inappropriate land management, environmental pollution and pressure from non-native species have all played a part in the erosion of England’s biodiversity.
All of the major groups of flora and fauna have experienced losses, with butterflies, amphibians, and many plant and other insect species being particularly hard hit – in some groups up to a quarter of species have been become extinct since 1800.
The report also lists nearly 1,000 native species whose survival is under severe threat today, and scientists working for Natural England fear that a tipping point has now been reached where the rate of extinction has outstripped evolution’s ability to generate new species:
“Although changes in species populations are a natural consequence of environmental change, recent technological advances have led to humans altering species’ habitats in ways and at rates that make it impossible for them to adapt. This has led to the decline and loss of many of England’s native species, losses that matter both for the intrinsic value of the species themselves, and because they are associated with damage to our natural environment.”
Or as Helen Phillips, Natural England’s Chief Executive put it: "Each species has a role and, like the rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost."
The outcome of the past 30 years of globalisation, actively promoted by governments as the only possible way for humanity to live, is the marketisation of increasing areas of the planet. No land, habitat or species has any value to capitalism unless it can be transformed into profit.
And we can easily track this accelerating attack on bio-diversity by looking at how, as industrial production has migrated to Asia, so the rate of extinctions there has increased. Our closest ancestors are being wiped out, with more than 70% of primates now on the “Red List” of endangered species. Over half of all mammals are under threat globally.
This shows that the profit-driven capitalist market operates in ways which are the direct opposite of the evolutionary process first described by Charles Darwin. His phrase “survival of the fittest” is often wrongly connected to the notion that greed is good and the strongest will survive.
But in fact natural evolution works in favour of diversity and not in favour of reduction to the most powerful. “Fittest” in Darwin’s conception equals not physically strongest, but best adapted. In periods when our planet has provided ideal conditions for great evolutionary surges, species evolved to populate every nook and cranny, every biological niche, on land and sea, with a staggering diversity.
Darwin explains in On the Origins of Species “how plants and animals remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations” and he adds that he uses the term “struggle for existence” in a large and metaphorical sense, “including dependence of one being on another”.
Unless human society begins urgently to use all its great scientific knowledge to reinstate, or finds ways of reproducing, this interdependence and co-operation between species, we risk not only the future of what the old religion called “lesser species”, but our own survival.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
Thursday, November 20, 2008
The great biomass grab
Although three-quarters of the world’s biomass has remained beyond grasp of the market economy, corporations are now poised to appropriate and further commodify biological products and processes in every part of the globe - as well as further destroy biodiversity, deplete soil and water and displace marginalised farmers.
The 48-page report exposes corporate concentration in commercial food, farming, health and the strategic push to commodify the planet's remaining natural resources. It reveals that:
- From thousands of seed companies and public breeding institutions three decades ago, 10 companies now control more than two-thirds of global proprietary seed sales
- From dozens of pesticide companies three decades ago, 10 now control almost 90% of agrochemical sales worldwide
- From almost 1,000 biotech start-ups 15 years ago, 10 companies now account for three-quarters of industry revenues
- The top 10 pharmaceutical companies control 55% of the global drugs market.
Who Owns Nature? warns that against a background of ecological, economic and financial crises, and with engineering of living organisms at the nano-scale, “industry is setting the stage for a corporate grab that extends to all of nature”. ETC Group's Pat Mooney explains: "About one-quarter of the world's biomass has already been commodified. With extreme genetic engineering, we're seeing new corporate strategies to capture and commodify the three-quarters of the world's biomass that has, until now, remained beyond the market economy."
When the food crisis is defined as food scarcity and hungry people, the market-based prescription is to further liberalise markets and boost agricultural production with heavy doses of new technology. The real disaster is the corporate controlled agro-industrial food system. This system has entrenched corporate power while undermining the ability of small-scale producers to produce food for their own communities. No matter how much new technology is employed in the name of boosting food production, the agro-industrial food system is incapable of feeding hungry people. And that’s because hunger and poverty are the consequences of inequitable systems – not food scarcity or inadequate technologies.
However, ETC Group’s Kathy Jo Wetter then goes on to call for “monitoring and oversight of corporations” by the same governments and institutions that the report correctly identifies as joint villains of the piece. This is simply not going to happen, especially as the economic recession will be used to give corporations a green light to do whatever it takes to boost growth and profits. There is no “vacuum in governance”, as the report claims, but an out-of-control global capitalist system and compliant governments. Wresting power out of their hands is the only way to go.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
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