Documents Markandya, Anil 4 results

"There are now a large number of valuation studies on the benefits of biodiversity and on ecosystem services, the services provided by different ecosystems (ESS). Both ideas have been used to elicit values from nature but in recent years the research community has focussed on ESS as the main organising framework, with some additional use of the biodiversity concept to value entities that have intrinsic value and are of an extraordinary nature. Estimates are available for the services from most habitats, by type of ecosystem service, usually expressed in USD per hectare per year. Coverage varies by habitat and region, as does the quality of the assessment, but it is possible now to carry out an estimation of changes in values for a number of ecosystem services a result of the introduction of a new policy or of a physical investment that modifies the ecosystem. While this is a positive development, there remain some issues to be resolved. One is the possibility of double-counting of services when using the standard categories of provisioning, regulating/supporting and cultural ESS. Regulating and supporting services are the basis of the provisioning services and so value estimates for the two cannot always be added up. For example, air pollution absorption is often valued using the cost of alternative ways of reducing the pollutants from the atmosphere while recreation is often valued in terms of willingness-to-pay (WTP) through stated preference methods."

Following 'Blueprint for a Green Economy' (the Pearce Report), David Pearce and his team have turned their attention to global environmental threats. If it makes sense to apply economic analysis to national environmental problems, then it makes even more sense to apply it to world-wide dangers. The authors start by describing the reasons for using economic approaches to common resources like climate, ozone and biodiversity. They then take a detailed look at the economic ways of tackling the issues involved in global warming, ozone layer depletion, environmental degradation in the Third World, population, rain forests, aid, equity, international environmental co-operation and what might amount to green foreign policies. They show not only how to take all these things into account in economic theory, but also the economic price of failing to do so. Blueprint 2 is an agenda for international and governmental economic action.

This report has been prepared by the London Environmental Economics Centre (LEEC). LEEC is a joint venture, established in 1988, by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the department of Economics of University College London (UCL). Popularly known as The Pearce Report, this book is a report prepared for the Department of the Environment. It demonstrates the ways in which elements in our environment at present under threat from many forms of pollution can be costed. The book goes on to show ways in which governments are able, as a consequence of this analysis, to construct systems of taxation which would both reduce pollution by making it too costly and generate revenue for cleaning up much of the damage. The book ends with a series of skeleton programmes for progress.