"Área 5"

Nature Inc.

Return of the groundbreaking series that puts a price-tag on environmental services.

The series kicks off with Natural Prevention, a reckoning of how an investment in natural barriers such as marshes and mangroves to tsunamis and hurricanes can save billions of dollars as well as thousands of lives. “Nature has spent billions of years developing how to do the most with the least”, comments one scientist in the programme.

The last programme in the six part series — Now and Forever — looks ahead to Copenhagen and the major climate conference convened to replace the Kyoto agreement.

“We feature the scary number crunching of former World Bank chief economist, Nicholas Stern, who has worked out that climate change, if it’s business as usual, could by 2100 cost up to 20% of World GDP. Taking action by contrast, would cost just 2%”, says programme producer, Ken Pugh.

Already according to the assessment of a new UN study set to report in 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, we are losing over US$ 4 trillion in so-called ecosystem services every year.

Interviewed by Nature Inc., the UN study leader and a former Deutsche Bank manager, Pavan Sukhdev, says: “These sums are staggering and represent the real credit crunch.”

Interviewed at the World Conservation Union headquarters in Switzerland, IUCN director general Julia Marton- Lefevre also tells Nature Inc.: “We have seen around the world the credit crunch is very real — but for a long time now there has also been a nature crunch going on — and it’s far bigger, but the world hasn’t realized it yet.”

Nature Inc. also spends a day in Washington DC with UNEP executive director, Achim Steiner, as he finds support from an unexpected quarter — the American trade unions that have begun to accept that investments in energy efficiency can help safeguard jobs.

Achim Steiner, tells Nature Inc.: “I believe the green economy is already happening all over the planet.”

“In all the programmes, Nature Inc. addresses the conundrum that while everyone accepts that conservation has an economic value, the unregulated free market cannot really fix a workable monetary value on ecosystem services,” says series editor Robert Lamb, a veteran of environmental programming for 25 years.

“But what is interesting is that the green calculations of wealth that 10 years ago would have been dismissed out of hand by most establishment economists are now widely accepted.”

“The root of the word ‘economy’ is ‘ecology’, perhaps it’s all turning full circle?”

“The ‘triple crunch’ of climate, credit, and energy insecurity, is forcing governments to seriously consider the “green economy” as a way of making a sustainable recovery.

The recent London G20 Summit emphasized that investment in environmentally sound technology and business could also create sustainable jobs.

Nature Inc. goes to China, India, USA, Spain, Bangladesh and Colombia to examine the claim that green investment equals green jobs.

BBC World News (adapted).

Acording to the ideas expressed in the text above, judge the following item.

Staggering ecosystem services epitomize a reduction in the general availability of loans or credit, due to the four-billiondollar deficit per year.