India and Brazil head move to `green` economic future
Baku, October 21 (AZERTAC). Governments are increasingly taking the economic value of nature into account in policy-making, with growing interest in results from a UN-backed analysis.
The Brazilian and Indian governments are among those keen to use findings from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) project.
Final results from the three-year study were unveiled here at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting.
Nature`s services must be counted if they are to be valued, its leader said.
Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank capital markets expert who leads Teeb on secondment to the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said that if society did not properly account for services that nature provides, they would be lost.
In an earlier analysis, Teeb calculated that the economic value of services being lost - including water purification, pollination of crops and climate regulation - amounts to $2-5 trillion dollars per year, with the poor hardest hit.
Here, Mr Sukhdev and his team concentrated on ideas for implementation - how to turn the findings of the study into real politics.
And the first thing for governments to do, he said, was to carry out national equivalents of the global Teeb study - to analyse the real value of ecosystem services to their economies.
"Conventional methods of accounting such as GDP accounting will not capture them - so we need... to rapidly upgrade the system of national accounts," he said.
"You cannot manage what you do not measure."
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