A key UN report on Monday warned that a global economy geared towards short-term profit is destroying the planet and called for a drastically different approach to valuing nature.
Without this shift, widely accepted goals of sustainable development and greater equity will remain elusive, noted the Science Advisory Board on Biodiversity, known as IPBES.
“The way we understand economic growth is at the heart of the biodiversity crisis,” Unai Pascual, an environmental economist at the University of Bern and co-chair of a 139-nation meeting in Bonn that approved the report, told AFP.
“The new assessment aims to inject different types of values into the decisions that lead us to transformative change.”
Around 80 experts have trawled through more than 13,000 studies, examining how market-based values have contributed to the destruction of ecosystems that sustain us and what other values might best promote sustainability.
A 34-page summary for policymakers, approved over the weekend, comes as the UN steers an international process to halt biodiversity loss and protect nature.
In December, nations gather to finalize a treaty tasked with halting the decline in biodiversity and setting humanity on a path to “living in harmony with nature” by mid-century.
“Nature feeds us all,” commented Inger Andersen, head of the United Nations Environment Programme. “It gives us food, medicine, raw materials, oxygen, climate regulation and much more.”
But a fivefold increase in GDP per capita since 1950 has mutilated the natural world that made such growth possible.
A million species – arguably including our own – are threatened with extinction, and global warming is on course to render large parts of the planet uninhabitable.
– “That will not be easy” –
Two landmark UN reports — one on climate change in 2018, another on biodiversity in 2019 — concluded that only sweeping changes in the way we produce, distribute and consume almost everything can stop runaway global warming and avert ecosystem collapse.
This already Herculean task will become nearly impossible, the IPBES report warns, unless humanity also changes its perception and appreciation of nature.
“When you look at nature as a factory at your service, your focus is on extracting the highest yields possible,” said Patricia Balvanera, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and co-chair of the report.
Many still fear that sustainability can only be achieved at the expense of well-being, even though a natural world that can regenerate itself is the basis for healthy societies in the future, scientists say.
A more differentiated assessment of nature could lead to better policy decisions, the IPBES authors conclude.
A rigorous cost-benefit analysis of development projects such as the Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia or the Mayan train project in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula weighed the value of electricity, tourism or jobs against the cost of construction or the displacement of the population.
A “living from nature” perspective can even quantify the economic value of damage to ecosystems such as carbon-absorbing forests or wetlands, or the loss of insect populations that pollinate crops.
“If nature is part of me, part of my family, then like in a family, the priority is to take care of each other,” Balvanera said. “It’s a completely different way of thinking.”
Many of the delegates and scientists from IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – are also part of the 196-nation Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which has been striving to find consensus on the future draft treaty Delivered December.
“We believe this value assessment can help negotiations find a solution politically,” noted Pascual, who said several delegates described it as “groundbreaking.”
“Right now there’s a murky feeling that this isn’t going to be easy at all.”
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