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  The Price of Survival: What Would It Cost to Save Nature?

The Price of Survival What Would It Cost to Save Nature?

By Philip Bethge, Rafaela von Bredow and Christian Schwägerl

Part 5: The Pricetag of Curtainling Exctinction: €30 billion

In short, a high level of diplomatic skill will be needed in Bonn to advance to the core issue: Who will pay how much and for what? The annual cost of curtailing species extinction by 2010 is estimated at €30 billion ($46.5 billion). The EU heads of state are even more ambitious and want to put a complete stop to the loss of biodiversity in Europe by 2010. However, the WWF believes that this goal can only be reached "at a significant additional cost."

Mastering the crisis will likely require a wide range of funding models. Focusing on biodiversity as a source for new drugs and cosmetics is one possibility, the trade in CO2 certificates is another. Private sponsors can also have an important impact. The conservation group TNC, for example, manages a fortune of $5.4 billion (€3.5 billion), some of it donated by wealthy patrons. In 2007 alone, TNC spent $566 million (€365 million) to purchase land and protect it for future generations.

Others have chosen to engage in something akin to colonial megalomania and personally control the fate of nature. Patagonia, for example, appears to be firmly in the hands of billionaires. For years, Douglas and Kris Tompkins, the co-founders of the apparel companies North Face and Patagonia, have owned several thousand square kilometers of untouched wilderness in the region. Some of their neighbors are speculator George Soros, fashion magnates Luciano and Carlo Benetton, actors Sharon Stone and Christopher Lambert, and CNN founder Ted Turner.

The not-quite-fabulously-rich can acquire tropical islands or hectare-sized pieces of wild animal corridors through organizations like TNC or World Land Trust.

Economist Pavan Sukhdev also recommends levying, in addition to the value-added tax, a kind of value reduction tax in wealthy countries -- a way of compensating for the environmental damage associated with the production of a car or a refrigerator. The revenues from such a tax could flow directly into large-scale conservation projects.

Sukhdev also wants to force companies and consumers to assume more responsibility. "A coffee company could charge a small surcharge and invest the money in the rainforest next to its plantations," he says. When it comes to organic food, consumers are already prepared to pay a premium today. "So why not create an Eco-Plus label to test whether they are willing to pay an additional premium to fund conservation projects?"

Nowadays, people can already make their travel climate-neutral by offsetting the emissions from aircraft or rental cars through companies like the German firm global-woods. The company uses the revenues to support reforestation programs in Argentina, Paraguay and Uganda. Another example is the Marriott hotel chain. The company has paid $2 million (€1.3 million) to the Brazilian state of Amazonas to protect the 589,000-hectare (1.45 million-acre) Juma preserve from loggers. In return, Marriott receives CO2 credits, which are then offered for sale to hotel guests so that they can continue to relax in their hotel saunas without suffering a bad conscience.

Fisheries experts, on the other hand, recommend only buying fish with the Marine Stewardship Council eco-label. Anyone hoping to enjoy eating marine creatures in an environmentally responsible way in the future will have to do without species like halibut or sole. When it comes to wood, most conservationists recognize the certification awarded by the Forest Stewardship Council.

According to estimates, within only two years consumers worldwide could be spending up to $75 billion (€48 billion) on fish, wood, medicinal herbs and food produced in an environmentally friendly way. In addition, people have long been willing to pay directly for species protection. According to the BfN, every household in Germany would pay an average of €100 ($155) a year to preserve biodiversity. This would amount to a total of €3.5 billion ($5.4 billion). "That's three times as much money as we have had at our disposal so far for species and habitat protection," says Burkhard Schweppe-Kraft, an economist with the BfN.

If natural landscapes are increasingly assigned a value, they could lose their role as "the world's free garbage dump," as Gordon Shepherd of the WWF puts it. But Shepherd also warns that adding value to nature is "no panacea." Indeed, it raises many questions. For instance, developing countries would have to prove that their goal is not simply to rake in additional cash, but that they are serious about protecting diversity.

The industrialized countries, for their part, are likely to be accused of merely orchestrating an enormous green-washing of a failed industrial policy, which for decades treated nature as a cheap self-service shop. Are the mechanisms of the global economy truly suitable for ensuring diversity?

"Conservation based purely on profit could fail in places where, for example, it seeks to protect animals that collide with our interests," writes Douglas McCauley of Stanford University in the journal Nature. According to McCauley, nature that does no harm, but is also of no benefit to man would also fail the economic test.

When wolves kill sheep or cormorants wreak havoc in commercial fish ponds, it is nothing but nature at work. On the other hand, people would be unlikely to pay for conservation based solely on its benefit to man.

Economics and the preservation of diversity are often diametrically opposed. About 50 years ago, for example, the Nile perch was deliberately introduced into Lake Victoria in East Africa. Fishermen in the countries adjoining the lake, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, remain enthusiastic about the arrival of the edible fish to this day, because it helped fuel copious economic growth. But the new arrivals spelled ecological disaster for the lake's diverse and unique population of haplochromine cichlids, leading to what social biologist Edward Wilson once called "the most catastrophic wave of extinctions in recent history."

Making the economic value of ecosystems the sole basis of conservation would mean that "nature is only worth protecting if it is also profitable," warns biologist McCauley, referring to the risk of a sudden decline in value.

What happens to the rainforest, which we now want to see serving as a CO2 storage system, if a cheaper technical solution is ultimately found to dispose of greenhouse gases? Will the forest then be liquidated, to borrow an economic term? The value of nature -- its beauty, and its cultural and evolutionary importance -- cannot be estimated, says McCauley. "In the long run, we will achieve more progress if we appeal to human hearts and not their wallets."

In other words, it is up to man to decide what kind of world he wishes to inhabit. Anyone familiar with wilderness knows what will be lost if environmental destruction continues unabated. By the time the world community can agree to a business model to save biodiversity, it could be too late.

We should also consider the need to preserve "refuges for the soul," says Beate Jessel, the president of the BfN. The CBD partners should also take this to heart if they hope to avoid becoming lost in a jungle of international agreements and bilateral sensitivities in Bonn.

Are we negotiating ourselves to death? Words must soon be followed by deeds. Indian economist Pavan Sukhdev, at any rate, sees the situation as dead serious. We face a decision, says Sukhdev, one whether or not our civilization is to survive.

Sukhdev was in Berlin recently for a meeting with German Environment Minister Gabriel to discuss the crisis. The ministry lies across the barren Alexanderplatz square, past a gray, concrete desert. "It's an ideal place for an environment ministry," says Sukhdev. "Every day you see the things you want to prevent."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.

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