Green Daily

Right now, in Germany, UN conveners are meeting to talk about biodiversity. And the news is not good. Yesterday, the Deutsche Bank presented a report to the convention which showed that we are causing $78 billion in damage to ecosystems every year. The bankers pointed out that loss of biodiversity threatens humans, in that it creates problems for supplies of food and water, makes land more vulnerable to invasive/exotic species, and generally degrades the resilience of the natural landscape. (This picture is of a palm-oil plantation in Borneo, a good example of a human-made landscape that reduces the biodiversity of the original ecosystem.)

Side note: How do they figure out these numbers? It's interesting to see the price that a bank can put on living things. I would rather see biodiversity losses reckoned into the general cost of doing business - if loss of ecosystems had always been tallied on the "cost" side of the cost-benefit ratio, the earth might look quite different. But isn't the reduction of all things to a dollar value part of the mindset that gets us into environmental trouble in the first place?

Via ENN