The price and value of biodiversity at Rio+20

How can we get a better understanding of the actual cost of exploiting the earth’s natural resources? What is the real value of biological diversity and of natural ecosystems? And which political and financial mechanisms can help provide for the decisive factor of biodiversity?

Parallel to the main negotiations at the Rio+20 Conference, various side events dealt with precisely these questions. Most significantly, they looked at the role played by nature in a green economy – as "natural capital". Pavan Sukhdev, the Indian economist and head of the TEEB study, stressed that nature is at the heart of any green economy. Therefore, poor farmers in particular should be paid appropriately if their everyday work contributes to nature preservation. Costa Rica successfully introduced one such “Payment for Ecosystem Services” programme as early as in 1996.

Yet putting figures on “economic services” provided by the diversity of species also raises critical questions. Many regions are reluctant to value nature in numbers or to consider it merely as a service for mankind. In recent years, governments in a number of emerging countries have presented initiatives that tackle this issue in various approaches. With Ecuador’s Yasuni-ITT initiative, for example, the country is to receive payment from industrialised nations if it refrains from exploiting the considerable oil fields in Yasuni National Park. The head of the UN Development Programme, Helen Clark, advocated supporting the initiative, as both the climate and biodiversity would be protected.

There is also a growing interest among non-state stakeholders in the prospects offered by the valorisation of biological diversity. In Rio, 39 institutions from the finance sector endorsed the Natural Capital Declaration, which aims to integrate natural capital into lending, investments and insurance of products and services.

adelphi is also engaging with the issue and, together with the ICCR Foundation, is compiling a report for the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag that will analyse and evaluate current discourse concerning the economic and social valorisation of biological diversity.