Time to put a price tag on nature’s economic worth
If the WWF Living Planet Report 2018 doesn’t push the world to act, nothing will
The WWF Living Planet Report 2018, a science-based assessment of the health of the planet, says that global wildlife populations have fallen by 60% in just over four decades, thanks to accelerating pollution, deforestation, climate change and other man-made factors. More than 4,000 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians declined rapidly between 1970 and 2014, the report said. The WWF has called for an international treaty, modelled on the Paris climate agreement, to be drafted to protect wildlife and reverse human impacts on nature. The report is alarming, and national governments, NGOs, media, and the public must shoulder the blame for failing spectacularly to initiate measures to arrest the trend even though there have been regular warnings.
The organisation’s 2016 report warned that global wildlife could decline by 67% by the end of this decade as a result of human activities. The 2017 UN Environment Annual Report and the 2018 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reports have also said more or less the same thing: The current efforts to protect the natural world are not keeping up with the speed of man-made destruction, and that the world is heading for an “ecological credit crunch” far worse than the financial crisis because humans are overusing the natural resources of the planet. This trend will continue unless human beings learn to minimise the use of resources and internalise the benefits of recycling/reuse.
One reason why the destruction in the name of “development” happens is that nature’s economic worth is invisible. Today, many economists are working to finetune standards for evaluating ecosystem services that nature provides. This step of attaching a price tag is probably the only way left to sensitise human beings that all creatures great and small have some role to play in sustaining the earth’s web of life.