log home Valuing ecosystem services: From 'reversing entropy' to the price of voles

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The Smith School world forum at Oxford University aims to tackle a big question: how can nature be valued so its worth – of all kinds – stops being lost

 

"Reversing entropy." That was the admirably concise description of life on Earth used by Sir David King to open the Smith School World forum on Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University last night. It refers to how life harnesses energy to create order out of chaos, and is thermodynamically appropriate for someone who started his career as a chemist.

 

The purpose of the forum is to gather over 100 experts from different fields to tackle major environmental questions and this year's question is how to value ecosystem services, an inelegant term for the clean air and water, food and wellbeing that nature gifts to us. As humanity has come to dominate the planet, those gifts have been overused and ecosystems, and the animals and plants that inhabit them, have been severely degraded.

 

So how to value them in a way that preserves – or conserves- them? I'll be reporting the ideas that come up over the next two day here on my blog. I'll tweet a bit on @dpcarrington, but you can follow the action from all the tweeters here on the #SSWFEE tag.

 

King's first point was to argue that whatever cosmologists might wish, there is no Planet B that humanity could flee too. "The conditions on Earth are not accidentally perfect for life, they are perfect because life has evolved into them," including by changing those conditions.

 

But, with November this year expected to see the seven billionth human join the living population, things have changed, he said. We are no longer adapting to Earth, the Earth is being changed by us.

 

The challenge - to support that growing population on a finite planet – is a "challenge we have never risen to" said King, "We have never shown the collective action implied by that statement."

 

Positive examples of success are needed to show the way, he said, citing the re-greening of the Loess plain in China, an area the size of Belgium so far. "We must find a way to value wellbeing over wealth."

 

Tiao Viana, governor of the state of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon spoke next. He painted the same vision of environmentally sustainable growth as I heard from environment minister Isabella Teixera in Brazil last year, and prof Gilberto Camara, who spoke impressively of Brazil's bid to be the first environmental superpower. Viana said his state had tripled people's income from 1995 to 2008 while cutting deforestation by 75%, and also boosting literacy and decreasing child mortality. He didn't mention the recent uptick in deforestation and violence I wrote about recently......................

.guardian.co.uk

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Valuing ecosystems 2: OECD to put green factors into economic analyses