he benefits
that human populations gain from healthy and functioning ecosystems are
vast. Clean drinking water filtered by forests, carbon stored in plants
and soil, crop pollination by wild insects and pharmaceutical uses of
plants are just a few examples of services humans usually receive for
free from nature. A recent wave of efforts to monetise the value of
ecosystem services presents an opportunity to both protect these assets
and bring their worth into the market. Currently, conservationists and
investors alike are moving into this space in hopes of achieving a
win-win for the economy and the environment. An array of public and
private mechanisms exist to use payments to encourage responsible land
management that preserves public benefits.
Whether it is restoring a watershed to provide clean
drinking water for large urban areas or restoring mangroves for
fisheries and storm protection, societies and governments can save
billions of dollars by helping nature do what it does best. Investing in
our ecological infrastructure is a cost-effective strategy for achieving
national and global objectives, such as increased resilience to climate
change, reduced risk from natural disasters and improved food and water
security - all of which contribute directly to poverty alleviation,
sustainable livelihoods and job creation.
A new economic approach that prioritises investment
in our ecological infrastructure is gaining attention, giving real
substance to that often vague and misleading phrase - the ‘Green
Economy’. This approach to investment must also consider appropriate
scale and time horizons so that the values of and trade-offs between
ecosystem services are used wisely to inform decision-making in both the
public and the private sectors.
Over the last 15 years, several major global studies
have demonstrated that natural capital and the ecosystem goods and
services that flow from it have significant and measurable economic
value. At present, there are significant private gains from the
utilisation of our natural capital, but the costs and impacts are
disproportionately borne by the public and the future generations.
Despite the tremendous economic value of healthy and
resilient ecosystems, investment in our ecological infrastructure
remains much too low. We are approaching critical thresholds where we
may no longer be able to recover our natural capital. It is cheaper to
maintain, conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystems than
to restore them. However, given the present state of ecosystem
degradation, restoration is now an imperative. The economic benefits
that flow from the restoration of degraded ecosystems can be several
times higher than the costs, as nature provides quality services at a
lower price than man-made or analogue systems. Mainstreaming ecosystem
restoration requires the assimilation of biodiversity and ecosystem
services values into decision-making processes governing all economic
activities that manage and use natural capital.
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