BBC Environmental Science – The world’s largest gathering of conservation scientists and NGOs have been meeting in Barcelona to ask: “What price do we put on nature?”
In these extraordinary times of credit crunch and climate change, the world feels hitched to an uncertain roller coaster ride where we don’t know what to value any more. What investors thought was safe as houses has turned out to be nothing more than the property of the poor disguised in a silver wrapper, enabling bankers to pocket billions.
In a curious way, all this chaos may turn out to be a good thing because it will force the world to ask: “Are we creating wealth that’s worth having?”
A wine broker said to me recently: “The thing about investing in a first growth is, the more the world drinks a good vintage, the more valuable it gets.” So could disappearing forests one day be a safer investment than houses. …
In global markets today, rainforests are worth more dead than
alive. Poor and often opaque governments, with little to sell, offer
their rainforests to raise revenue, attracting largely risk capital
with strings attached.
The only way to do this is to convert rainforests into
something else, usually timber, beef, soy or palm oil that Westerners,
and now prosperous Asians, have a burgeoning appetite for.
Most deforestation today is enterprise driven and funded by
hedgefunds, pension funds, and other sources of liquidity from capitals
often far from, and blind to, the forests they are destroying. Billions in green dollars end up on investors’ balance sheets,
but there is a catch: billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide goes up in
smoke from the trees burned in the process - and the risk to everyone
is building up to a climate credit crisis.
The timetable on this issue is tight. In December 2006, at the
UN in New York, Papua New Guinea invited rich countries to pay poor
ones to stop deforestation. In May 2007, London’s Independent newspaper blew the whistle
on “the hidden cause of global warming”, the destruction of the world’s
rainforests. (10/14/08)
more…