Weekly newsletter - Monday 19th of July 2010
Businesses Could Benefit From Protecting Biodiversity
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study is a major international initiative to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity, to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to draw together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical actions moving forward.
Back in February I went to an Earthwatch lecture at the Said Business School in Oxford given by Pavan Sukhdev, TEEB study leader, who already then emphasised the importance of evaluating the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the associated decline in ecosystem services worldwide, and comparing them with the costs of effective conservation and sustainable use. These ideas are collated in the TEEB Climate Issues update (2009) and the TEEB for Policy Makers Report (2009).
The latest TEEB report: "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Report for Business" (executive summary here), argues that many sectors have a stake in protecting nature and that businesses can and should take a key role in stemming biodiversity loss around the world.
The report illustrates the importance and immense value of natural services provided to, and affected by, a wide range of industries and identifies the direct drivers of biodiversity loss, including habitat loss and degradation, climate change, pollution, over-exploitation and the spread of invasive species. It adds that projections of the impacts of climate change, in particular, show continuing changes in the distribution and abundance of species and habitats, resulting in increasing species extinction. It further provides that biodiversity loss cannot be seen in isolation from other trends, such as climate change, increasing scarcity of natural resources and/or declining quality of ecosystem services.
TEEB will produce its final report for October's meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Japan, which will see governments examining the reasons why they have failed to live up to their 2002 pledge to curb nature loss by 2010.
Melting ice – photo slide show
Mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears presents a series of extraordinary images: then-and-now photographs from the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau documenting the swift melting of the region’s glaciers. Unearthing archival photographs that date back more than a century and comparing them with photos he took in the last three years, Breashears — who has reached the summit of Mount Everest five times — demonstrates that these great rivers of ice have steadily dwindled over the past century. Should the melting continue, Breashears notes, the water supplies of hundreds of millions of people across Asia will be threatened. View the photos, including striking panoramas, and read Breashears’ account here.