By Jo Confino – The Guardian
It's particularly refreshing to meet a senior banker concentrating his efforts on preserving our natural ecosystems and biodiversity rather than hastening their demise through irresponsible lending.
Pavan Sukhdev, who served on the board of Deutsche Bank's Global Markets Centre in Mumbai and headed up the groundbreaking Teeb (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) report, is doing for nature what Sir Nicholas Stern sought to do for climate change – putting a value on it.
Teeb, developed under the auspices of the United Nations environment programme, was designed to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to draw together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical actions moving forward.
While it was published only last summer, Sukhdev says it is already starting to gain traction. He welcomes Puma's announcement this week of the creation of an environmental profit and loss account, the first corporate to do so.
He also points to last month's launch by the World Bank's Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystems Services (Waves) project.
The objective is the "greening" of national income accounts, as they constitute the primary source of information about the economy, such as GDP, and are widely used for assessment of economic performance and policy analysis in all countries.
Sukhdev says it will take three to five years to create a common methodology for national ecosystem accounting. India has already committed to creating green accounts by 2015 and Sukhdev says that Norway and Australia already have "outstandingly" good information to allow them to generate building natural capital into their accounts.
In some ways Sukhdev sees it as a failure of humanity that we should even be in a position where we have to put an economic value against the majesty of nature herself.
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