The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [25]
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 globalized 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 percent for woodlands to 50 percent for tropical forests to 79 percent 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 percent) 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 portion of water charges to be paid out to landowners willing to preserve forest lands and reduce agricultural clearances. So far 1,800 square kilometers of forest have been protected at a cost of $300 million, both safeguarding biodiversity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of 3.2 million tonnes.54 In the Maldives, whose government I work for as an environmental adviser, one of the schemes under consideration is a levy on diving trips to fund the creation and policing of marine parks.