Nature Inc.

Zanimivo, vendar vprašljivo. V US so se močvirja vseeeno zmanjšala, saj so jih delali tam, kjer je bila zemlja poceni, se pravi nekje daleč v naravnih območjih, ki niso bila primerna za močvirja, vodo so speljali tja od daleč, uničili naravni habitat ki je vladal tam prej, skratka, mnogo teh nadomestnih močvirij ni opravljalo svojih naravnih funkcij, zaradi katerih so pomembna. Tudi živali, povezane s takšnim specifičnim ekosistemom, se v mnogih primerih ne morejo prilagoditi na to okolje, na katerega niso prilagojene.

Podobno kot pri avtocestah v Sloveniji, saj mostovi za prehod divjadi vedno ne uspejo. Živali se enostavno ne navadijo nanje, populacijam se tako prekine njihove poti in stike, se pravi tudi parjenje.

Vsekakor zanimiv prispevek - vredno ogleda!!!!

KEEP STIRRING

Robert Lamb, producer of dev tv’s Nature Inc. on the background to the series.

“When I hear that a meteorite is on its way to obliterate humans, and give life on earth a chance to start over, I shall raise my glass,” the former British Labour Minister, Tony Banks told me in an interview shortly before he died. At least James Lovelock of Gaia fame says we have 20 years to go out and enjoy ourselves. His contention is that the juggernaut of climate change and species extinction is unstoppable…whatever we do.

Some scientists are, indeed, deeply pessimistic about our chances of keeping the living fabric of life sufficiently intact to avoid economic and social breakdown.

Take population. Our human numbers increase by 200,000 a day. The biggest growth by far takes place in the desperately poor places of our world. Poor people are – unwittingly – as destructive as the rich. A billion people – one in every six – depend directly on their environment for energy (wood or charcoal), water (from a river or a village well) and sustenance (soil and fish). These desperately poor people are living a lifestyle of self-immolation.

Add on predictions from serious quarters of a 4 per cent increase in global temperature and the loss of 150 species a day, and my goodness, the outlook is bleak.

Are we to be the locusts who gobble everything in sight and then perish? Where can the dramatic, ‘to scale’ change – impossible to attain according to those like Lovelock – come from?

Oddly enough, the dismal science, economics, might come to our collective rescue.

There is a new breed of economist beginning to be heard in serious places such as the World Bank.

Five years ago Professor Robert Costanza and his team at the University of Vermont priced the services that nature provides to the global economy at around US$33 trillion – at that time, more than the combined wealth of every economy on earth.

Costanza and the ‘eco-economists’ are criticised by those who believe that putting a price tag on ecosystem services is political correctness gone crazy. Others say it’s counterproductive to reduce nature to economic good – what do we do about the services that have no value?

Underestimating Nature

When I interviewed Costanza recently he told me the calculation is a serious underestimate. Nature’s services, he says, are a public good… “We do need to recognise they are valuable relative to a private good and if we don’t recognise that we over-exploit and deplete them to our social dis-benefit”.

In this view, we have left nature off the books. And some might argue that this is possibly the greatest white collar crime of the last century. But is it feasible to put a price on nature’s services? And if our way of assessing “wealth” embraces ecosystems and their services would it make any difference to the pace of environmental destruction?

That’s what we asked in the first series, of Nature Inc.

Bloom or bust

In our first programme we featured the honeybee and showed how utterly dependent the $2 billion Californian almond crop – source of 80% of the world’s almonds – is on the pollinator-in-chief. Its annual services to US agriculture alone are worth between US$15-20 billion. In 2006 a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder resulted in the desertion of 800,000 hives.

It’s happening in other parts of the world as well and scientists cannot pinpoint the cause. Heading an investigation into the disorder, Dr Gordon Wardell of the US Department of Agriculture concludes it is our love-fest with intensive agriculture that has pushed the bees too far “Like people, they thrive on diversity” says Wardell.

It’s not just bees. All kinds of pest devourers and seed spreaders like frogs and bats contribute trillions of dollars to the world economy.

A whole programme was given over to the devastating impact of alien species such as the cane toad in Australia or the Burmese python in the USA. One assessment is that the damage caused by alien species costs the global economy US$1.4 trillion every year.

Another story featured the victimised fruit bat in West Africa. In Ghana it finds refuge from the bush meat hunters in military barracks. And yet the Shea tree which yields the butter for chocolate and cosmetics needs the bats to spread its seeds.

So what is the value of the fruit bat to Ghana? No-one has worked it out, but it’s more that the 60 cents it costs to buy a roasted one in the markets of Accra.


Shrimps vs Mangroves

At present most governments deliver projections of wealth where an oil spill would show up as generating wealth (the extra economic activity of salvage, chemicals, over-time etc). But the damage to the local marine ecosystem just doesn’t appear. Nature has no value, in this method of calculation.

Imagine that you are a manager for a Pension Fund. Imagine, too, there is an investment opportunity to turn a slice of mangrove swamp into an industrial shrimp farm that will, over ten years, bring in a handsome profit. The swamp brings in nothing. You will invest in shrimps. Meanwhile the country has lost a valuable fish nursery, a barrier against hurricanes and sea level rise and a biodiversity pool.

A comparative study in Thailand found that shrimps were worth $5.443 per hectare, meanwhile the true value to society of the mangrove was $35,696 per hectare.

Multiplied a million times a day, eco-economists argue that investing short instead of long is what is at the base of the planetary green asset stripping.

Green shoots

So should we be welcoming that meteorite or whooping it up until the green doomsday?

Perhaps not, not yet at any rate. There are some green shoots out there.

Real change, several contributors argued, has to come to come from governments pressured by the public. The final episode of Nature Inc underlined this, showing that governments are crucial in creating markets for environmental assets such as wetlands.

Most of us may not want new laws or taxes, but we can use our voting power to push for change for long-term common good, of the not-so-painful, politically acceptable variety. Cap and trade; bio-credits; paying directly for ecosystem services; trusts that enable private investment for public good. These are all being tried out. And we reported on the ups and downs of the new approaches.

In Costa Rica the government pays farmers to conserve or replant forests rather than use land for cattle and maize, with income from freshwater users such as breweries or HEP dams. It’s an environmental policy that safeguards water supply, biodiversity and tourism.
In our edition on the economic return on preserving watersheds, we found that New York has one of the cheapest and cleanest water supplies in the USA because in the 1970s it was decided to keep the Catskill mountains undeveloped.

Other countries – Norway and Canada for instance – are making serious attempts to reassess the way they measure national wealth, to include ecosystem services.
Wanted: New Stories.

I started making environmental films in the 1980s. Then we had no problem in finding sceptics to balance programme output. Many so-called “environmentalists” were angered that a film on environmental issues would not take the orthodox green line. The big difference nowadays, is that its next to impossible to find any established economises or scientists or even businessmen who will not agree that the planet is being asset-stripped at a truly alarming rate.

There is new green thinking out there and some of it is grappling with pricing renewable assets. As such we felt it was a legitimate new area to take as an organising theme for the new series.

We had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the first series, but there were a small minority who wrote in to say they hated the premise of the whole series. That’s good, we want to foster discussion in Nature Inc. which is why we are encouraging viewers to contribute ideas for the next series.

In the opening programme, Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the UK’s environment ministry pretty much dismissed Dr Co stanza’s calculations but added that what he had done was stirred up a debate about an important issue. And that’s we intend to do – to keep stirring up by giving airtime to the best scientific and economic sources we can find.