The China Dialogue

June 16, 2021
A lot of money is needed to prevent spiralling biodiversity loss; somewhere between US$598 billion and US$824 billion a year, according to the Nature Conservancy and Paulson Institute. The good news is that around half of that could be met with existing finance, redirected from activities that damage nature to those that enhance it.

The bad news is countries already agreed to do this in 2010, but most failed to even identify what subsidies they were promoting that caused problems, never mind reform them. The value of subsidies that harm biodiversity has been estimated to be five or six times higher than finance for promoting conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The issue is still very much alive. The draft text of the Kunming agreement – the successor to the failed 2010 Aichi targets – includes a target to reform subsidies, and eliminate those that are most harmful to biodiversity so that incentives are positive or at least neutral for biodiversity by 2030. The EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy published last year also supports phasing out subsidies that harm biodiversity.

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Thomson Reuters Foundation

March 11, 2021
Conservationists and environment officials hope new U.N. standards to measure the value of nature can help governments slow the rapid decline of plant and animal species worldwide.

Adopted this week by the U.N. Statistical Commission, the accounting system comes as a global movement gathers pace to protect the natural world by valuing the contributions forests, wetlands and other ecosystems make to economies and societies.

The benefits of preserving nature, such as reducing carbon emissions, producing water and boosting resilience to extreme weather, exceed the value of exploiting it, according to a study published this week in the Nature Sustainability journal.

If Nepal's Shivapuri Nagarjun National Park were turned from forest into farmland, for instance, instead of boosting the economy, it would create an $11-million annual deficit by cutting carbon storage 60% and water quality 88%, researchers estimated.

So how can the monetary value of nature be measured, and what does it mean for global efforts to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss?

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International Institute for Sustainable Development

March 8, 2021
The UK Government has published an independent review that provides a global assessment of the economic benefits of biodiversity and the costs of biodiversity loss, and recommends actions to simultaneously enhance biodiversity and deliver economic prosperity.

In 2019, the UK Government commissioned Cambridge University economist Partha Dasgupta to provide a global review on the economics of biodiversity. Following the publication of an interim report in April 2020, the final publication titled, ‘The Economics of Biodiversity: the Dasgupta Review,’ was issued ahead of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The publication’s formal launch, hosted by the Royal Society, took place on 2 February 2021.   

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PhysOrg

March 8, 2021
The economic benefits of conserving or restoring natural sites "outweigh" the profit potential of converting them for intensive human use, according to the largest-ever study comparing the value of protecting nature at particular locations with that of exploiting it.

A research team led by the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) analysed dozens of sites—from Kenya to Fiji and China to the UK—across six continents. A previous breakthrough study in 2002 only had information for five sites.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, come just weeks after a landmark report by Cambridge Professor Partha Dasgupta called for the value of biodiversity to be placed at the heart of global economics.

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