India is to be the first country to publish accounts tracking its plant, animal, water and other ‘natural wealth’ alongside financial measurements such as GDP.
The announcement will be made in the next few days at a meeting of world governments in Japan to try to halt global destruction of biodiversity.
The World Bank will coordinate efforts to set common measures, such as the value of ecosystems and their ‘services’ for humans — from relaxation to clean air and fertile soil and hopes it can sign up 10 to 12 countries to publish their results by 2015 at the latest.
The move fulfils one of the demands of a UN report released on October 20 at the meeting in Japan, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb). The report was commissioned by the G8+5 major nations in 2007 in the hope of repeating the success of the British economist Nicholas Stern’s report on climate change in persuading governments of the economic case for taking action to save the naturalworld. Pavan Sukhdev, an economist and the Teeb study leader, said, “Natural capital is a massive asset class, and developing nations’ biggest asset. For it to be missing from the balance sheet of the nation, or for failures not to be counted, does not make sense.”
The report did not put a specific value on the world’s biodiversity, though Sukhdev spoke of “the multi-trillion-dollar importance” of the natural world. It said there was plenty of evidence for national and local governments, businesses and individuals to radically review how they make decisions to take into account the damage or preservation of biodiversity.
The report recommends that countries and companies should publish accounts of their natural capital, and how much it has increased or decreased over the previous year, in parallel with traditional financial accounts. This should help to address current accounting rules, which, for example, measure the cleanup of a pollution spill as an increase in economic activity (by the clean up companies), but take no account of the long-term damage done. 
Such measures would be more likely to encourage other suggested changes, such as paying people to protect or restore ecosystems, refunding those who do not cut down forests and farmers who use fewer chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and better certification schemes so that those who produce products and services, such as food and drink, in more environmentally friendly ways can get recognition and charge higher prices to cover extra costs. The report calls for the reform of subsidies for damaging industries, such as mining and intensive farming, and tougher fines for polluters. The report team estimates that at present rates deforestation will cost the global economy $2-45 trillion a year by the middle of this century. The total environmental damage caused by the world’s 3,000 biggest listed companies in 2008 is thought to add up to at least $2.2 trillion.
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