IF YOU were ever in any doubt that biodiversity matters, take a look at the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a mammoth $24 million multi-agency report published this week. It is a hard-nosed effort that hardly mentions the notion that biodiversity is good for its own sake. It focuses instead on the importance of ecosystems to people: how they feed and water us, clothe us and help us stay warm and dry. And though it contains few surprises – it is hardly hot news that we are destroying our ecosystems at an ever increasing rate – its message is explosive.
The research underpinning the MA, all thoroughly peer-reviewed, amounts to the fullest ever assessment of the present state of ecosystems, and paints a portrait of what things will be like if we carry on with business as usual. It is not a pretty picture (see “The world can’t go on living beyond its means”).
The MA highlights the gulf between the way we run our world and what ecosystems need to flourish. It is self-evident that nature ignores national frontiers; yet policies are set mainly at the national level, so damage inflicted by one country may have huge impact in another. Policymakers’ primary concern is economic growth, yet few assign economic values to their environment. As a result, policy on, say, logging takes no account of impacts such as the reductions in water capture, recreational value and rainfall that follow deforestation.
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There is also a mismatch between the four years or so during which democratic governments expect their policies to deliver and the much longer timescales on which many ecosystems work. So the full impact of a damaging change may not be seen for decades.
Despite these difficulties, the MA has an upbeat conclusion: if we act now, we can turn the world’s ailing ecosystems around. It presents examples of policies that will let people coexist more successfully with the life around them. These policies are extremely challenging. They require politicians to think not nationally but regionally or globally, to think long-term and to develop economic indicators for environmental health – or to broaden their thinking beyond the economic. Many countries have started to think in these ways. European farmers are beginning to be paid not to produce food but to protect biodiversity, while trading of permits to emit sulphur dioxide has worked in the US to reduce acid rain. The MA shows that these measures are only a tiny step in the right direction.
Politicians are not obliged to adopt the MA’s recommendations. But ignoring them is not the smart option. The MA should do for ecosystems what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done for global warming: make it a hot political issue. And if the ecosystem assessment is repeated at regular intervals, as intended, countries that are indifferent to their environment will be exposed. The most compelling reason for acting on the MA stems from one of its chief conclusions: there is a clear link between healthy ecosystems and healthy humans. Destroy those ecosystems and our economies – and our quality of life – will suffer.
