The pressures on biodiversity and ecosystem services across the world are growing and need urgent attention. Our livelihoods are under threat because of our total dependence on both. The absence of markets and prices for many of these services is a key underlying cause. In future, as pressures are expected to increase further, impacts on people across the world could increase as factors such as water shortages, food supply constraints and health care implications come to the fore, says a new report released today.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity interim report, a first assessment stemming from a G8+5 initiative sponsored by Germany and the European Commission, points to many such pressures and the need for improved valuation metrics for pricing natural resources. The main pressures come from population growth, changing diets, urbanisation, climate change and invasive alien species.

Current trends on land and in the oceans demonstrate the severe dangers that biodiversity loss poses to human health and welfare. Climate change is exacerbating this problem. And again, as with climate change, it is the world’s poor who are most at risk from the continuing loss of biodiversity and flawed economic analysis of its consequences.

The report shows that under a “business as usual” scenario, the current decline in biodiversity and the related loss of ecosystem services will continue and in some cases even accelerate. By 2050 we could be faced with the loss of around a tenth of remaining natural areas, chiefly as a result of conversion for agriculture, the expansion of infrastructure, and climate change, and the loss of 60% of coral reefs could be lost - even by 2030 - through fishing, pollution, diseases, invasive alien species, and coral bleaching due to climate change.

Speaking about the report, Pavan Sukhdev the study leader said, “Nature is the source of much value to us everyday, yet it mostly bypasses markets, escapes pricing and defies valuation. This lack of valuation is now becoming a critical issue and we see the convergence of several impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems making the case for better metrics compelling.” Evidence to support urgent action is available in many areas. Recent increases in food and other commodity prices show how increasing demands for land are in turn putting pressures on biodiversity, ecosystems and social cohesion. Environmental conflicts from riots to systematic violence result from disputes over natural resources, including biodiversity. All the world’s commercial fisheries could collapse by 2050. Unprecedented water shortages are increasingly apparent in many parts of the developed world from USA to Australia to southern Europe. Species-rich regions of the world are under pressure from agriculture conversion, putting at risk hundreds of medicinal plants that are the basis for global health care.

“Incorporating the true value of biodiversity and ecosystem services into policy decisions is the ultimate aim.”, says Pavan Sukhdev. “There are ethical choices involved in particular between present and future generations and between peoples in different parts of the world. Taking these aspects into account will also give the world a better chance of achieving the Millennium Development Goals”, he added.

The good news is that some promising policies are already being tried out in some countries and show the potential to be replicated globally. Examples include International Payments for Ecosystem Services (Costa Rica), habitat banking (USA) and revenue sharing programmes for protected areas (Uganda).

Achieving global scale for these and other policies requires rethinking today’s subsidies for tomorrow’s policies, creating new markets and policy instruments, sharing the benefits of conservation more equitably and accounting fully in economic terms for the costs and benefits of ecosystem services. These will be some of the areas given most attention in phase 2 of the TEEB Study, due to conclude in 2010.

For further information contact:

Mark Schauer
Federal Environment Ministry Environment
Tel +49 228 305 2629
Mark.Schauer [at] bmu.bund.de