Has Enough Value Been Placed on Biodiversity?
A week ago today, the conference of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), in Nagoya, Japan, reached what was widely considered to be a successful conclusion. Unlike last year’s Copenhagen climate talks, an agreement was settled, and having failed to stem the loss of biodiversity against previous targets, a new ten-year plan was developed. Amongst other things, the parties “agreed to at least halve and where feasible bring close to zero the rate of loss of natural habitats”. Targets were set for 17% of the planet’s land surface and 10% of the seas to become protected areas by 2020. And substantial increases in the level of funding provided to carry out the plans were pledged. But is this enough, even if the targets are met this time round?
Reaching such an agreement between 18,000 participants from the 193 parties to the CBD is certainly an achievement, and with so many competing demands it is understandable that targets might not have gone as far as many had hoped. Yet other conservationists have been quick to point out that up to 13% of the Earth’s surface is already protected, while the target of protecting 10% of the seas remains unchanged from before. Having already failed the 2010 target of a “significant reduction” in the rate of biodiversity loss, the agreement still openly acknowledges that many more natural habitats are going to be lost.
Some still see a ray of hope in the fact that the issue is now firmly on the political agenda. The release of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report – the first ever effort to quantify the economic value of biodiversity and ecosystems – has been seen as crucial for this. It is in many ways depressing that “this approach reduces the biosphere to a subsidiary of the economy”, as George Monbiot put it earlier this week in The Guardian. But as mentioned before, at least now it’s in a language that decision-makers will not only understand, but will also hopefully take more seriously. Perhaps even heads of state will attend the next biodiversity conference!
All the same, Monbiot (who also points out that a binding agreement from Nagoya has yet to actually materialise) issues a far more grave concern: “As soon as something is measurable it becomes negotiable. Subject the natural world to cost-benefit analysis and accountants and statisticians will decide which parts of it we can do without."
Sadly, in the short-term this is probably so. Therefore the real challenge is to get governments worldwide to take the long-term view, where the value of ecosystems and biodiversity will literally stand the test of time.
Take Asian elephants, for example. Calculating their long-term economic value would still surely be a useful exercise that could aid their conservation.
Elephants are one of the greatest examples of an ecological “keystone” species: the lives of so many other organisms depend on their existence and they define the ecosystems in which they are found. Their consumption of vast amounts of vegetation, and even how they physically open up clearings, for example, ensures that certain plant species don’t come to dominate in any one environment. This results in a much greater variety of plants and also animals that feed on them. Elephants’ feeding behaviour is also such that what they spill or shake free from high branches can suddenly become available to other animals. Elephants are also known to enlarge and deepen water supplies with their tusks in times of drought, and this too benefits countless other animals. Furthermore, numerous plants rely on them to disperse their seeds and help them germinate in their very own parcels of organic fertiliser. Animals that subsequently feed on these plants, and the animals that feed on them, therefore indirectly depend on the elephants. Because of the great quantity of seeds that they are passing and the distances over which they do so, one can see how elephants genuinely do shape their environments. Lose the elephants and the ecosystems rapidly deteriorate.
The sort of “ecosystem services” that these environments provide to the planet, as well as to sustain human life, include everything from water purification, climate regulation (e.g. carbon storage), pollination and protection from disasters, to soil formation, photosynthesis and nutrient cycling. Therefore, because of the key role that they play (let alone their cultural value and the income they help generate through tourism), wouldn’t it be useful to know just how valuable Asian elephants are to the world?
It seems that there is still a great deal of convincing to be done before biodiversity and ecosystems are valued sufficiently. In the meantime, once the agreement from the CBD conference does finally emerge, it will first and foremost be our collective responsibility to ensure that governments worldwide do come good on all that they have agreed for biodiversity. And then push for more!
Read the George Monbiot article in The Guardian here
written by Dan Bucknell on 05th November 10
