Biodiversity in the news: Benn to call on world leaders to adopt biodiversity pricing

Posted: 17 February 2010

A recent article in the Guardian, flagged through the International Year of Biodiversity newsletter (26th January 2010).

World leaders must find a way to price the impact of their decisions on biodiversity in the same way that the international community is finding a way of pricing carbon, the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, said today.

Benn was setting out some of the Labour election manifesto thinking before a speech tomorrow in which he will warn that the world may be going through its sixth great extinction event – when many species decrease sharply. But he will warn against pessimism over the failure of the Copenhagen talks, saying a way has to be found to reverse "the collective loss of personal, economic and environmental optimism".

He said he believed one way to repel the attack on biodiversity was to repeat the success of the report into the economic consequences of climate change produced for the Treasury by Lord Stern in 2006. Britain is part-funding a report being prepared for the European commission by the Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev into the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity. It is due to report to the UN conference on biodiversity at the end of the year in Japan.

Benn said: "We have got the Climate Change Act that means for the first time the carbon consequences of the decisions we make have to be taken into account by government, and so the next thing is to do that in the same way with the natural world. The report prepared by Sukhdev can do for our understanding of the natural world what Nick Stern did for the understanding of the economic impact of climate change."

For the full article visit:
guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/25/hilary-benn-biodiversity-pricing