I, too, am pleased to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby. Last year, the UN climate change convention met in Copenhagen. It attracted the most incredible media frenzy, and something of a political frenzy as well, as Prime Ministers, Ministers and politicians from all over the globe made sure that they had a suitable photo opportunity.
In a month's time, its sister convention on biological diversity will meet in Nagoya, Japan, to discuss why whole species are moving into extinction at a rate that, barring the loss of the dinosaurs, is unprecedented in the entirety of the fossil record of life on this planet. So far, the convention has met with total radio silence from the world's press—why? How do the world's most eminent scientists propose that we tackle the problem of extinctions?
One of the first things I was told in the Department that the Minister now occupies was the wonderful target that had been set to halve the rate of decline in species loss by 2010. That was the UK's national target. I said that that was wonderful and asked the civil servant what was the rate of loss that we were going to halve. He said that the rate of loss was not known, and I asked how we would halve the rate if we did not know what it was. He replied that we would use indicators. We started without a sufficient baseline. The European Union tried to bail us out, of course, and said that it would substantially reduce the rate of loss. That European target was a bit woollier. With such an assessment at the beginning of the project, it is not very surprising that we reached 2010 to find that even those indicators have not enabled us to say that we have had any real success.
Where will we go in Nagoya? Top of the agenda will be natural capital. I welcome the Minister's comments on the subject, and all that he said about the TEEB report and Pavan Sukhdev's astonishing work. We must take on board the fact that one of the great advances in the past 100 years in classical economics was acknowledgment that there is such a thing as human, social and intellectual capital. We have come to realise that a well functioning judicial system and an excellent education system are as much a part of the wealth of a nation as its roads, ports and factories. The irony is that economists and economies have not caught up with the most important capital—natural capital.
Natural capital may be defined as the benefits that accrue to human society from the different species of life that inhabit the natural world—the biodiversity that is the subject of our debate. Classical economics values things such as forests by adding the sale price of the timber that can be harvested, and the alternative use to which the land may be put. A pine forest in the mountains will be worth a lot less per hectare than a forest of oak and ash close to good arable land and a river. Soft wood pine sells for pulp or low-grade timber, but oak and ash sell for designer kitchens. The mountain land has few alternative uses, but river land may raise prime beef. So that is how forests are valued. Wrong.
The true value of forests lies in far more than that. They stop soil erosion, prevent flooding by absorbing moisture, and control climate, often regulating local as well as global weather patterns. They are a source of medicines and food, and they have recreational and aesthetic value. All that is before carbon sequestration has been mentioned. In the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 1,360 of the world's top scientists showed that classical economics captured only one third of the actual value of the services that forests provide. The same is true for rivers, reefs, salt marshes, mangroves and all other natural ecosystems. We fail to factor in their actual economic value to our policies and decision making, but because most of the other services that they provide are not bought or sold in markets, they are normally not taken into account, so the forests, reefs and rivers are lost or degraded.
Another important consideration is that those wider benefits, although immensely valuable, do not accrue to an individual property owner. The benefits are experienced by a community at large. They are regarded as free goods by the wider economy and the wider community, which would no more think of paying for flood protection provided by the local forest than of paying for the air they breathe, which is also provided in part by the local forest. In classical economics, such free goods are called externalities, but because they are not directly captured by the landowner they do not feature in their decisions on how or whether to dispose of them.
Biodiversity
Proceeding contribution from
Barry Gardiner
(Labour)
in the House of Commons on Thursday, 16 September 2010.
It occurred during Adjournment debate on Biodiversity.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
515 c319-21WH 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
Westminster Hall
Subjects
Librarians' tools
Timestamp
2023-12-15 22:48:02 +0000
URI
http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_665502
In Indexing
http://indexing.parliament.uk/Content/Edit/1?uri=http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_665502
In Solr
https://search.parliament.uk/claw/solr/?id=http://data.parliament.uk/pimsdata/hansard/CONTRIBUTION_665502