Excerpt from Planet Ark, 10 September 2009
'The world is waking up to huge economic benefits of investing in nature, from forests to coral reefs, after one of the "great oversights" of the 20th century, the head of the U.N. Environment Program said on Friday.
Achim Steiner told Reuters that governments had long placed too much faith in technology to fix problems such as global warming, water pollution or erosion, instead of looking to natural solutions.
"At the beginning of the 21st century we are being thrown back onto nature because you can't fix all these problems with technology," he said.
"The disproportion of investments in technological fixes versus investing in nature's ready-made solutions, tried and tested over millions of years, is one of the great oversights of the 20th century," he said.
A U.N.-backed study this week, for instance, indicated that tropical forests provide services worth an estimated $6,120 per hectare (2.47 acres) a year such as food, building materials, water purification or opportunities for tourism.
A new U.N. climate pact due for agreement in December in Copenhagen is set to encourage measures to safeguard tropical forests that soak up greenhouse gases when they grow.
Steiner said that governments should take an even wider view of the value of forests since storing heat-trapping carbon dioxide was only one aspect of a tree's worth.
COST BENEFITS
He said his advice to governments and investors was: "Don't just look at a forest as a watershed, or a carbon sink, or as helping biodiversity, or a tourism attraction. Put them all together and then make a cost-benefit analysis."
"The cumulative set of benefits you get from talking about a tree ... has to get economically captured," he said.
Among other natural systems, coral reefs provide services as nurseries for fish, protecting coasts from storms, or as scuba-diving holiday destinations. Or insects provide services, for instance, in pollinating crops...
Steiner also said a call by UNEP last year for a "Green New Deal" of investments in clean economic growth to revive struggling economies had helped but that it was too soon to judge if it marked a permanent greener shift.
"This concept struck a chord," he said of the idea, inspired by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" that helped end the Depression of the 1930s.'
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