Nature 'is worth billions' to UK

Richard Black BBC News 1 Jun 11;

The UK's parks, lakes, forests and wildlife are worth billions of pounds to the economy, says a major report.

The health benefits of merely living close to a green space are worth up to £300 per person per year, it concludes.

The National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA) says that for decades, the emphasis has been on producing more food and other goods - but this has harmed other parts of nature that generate hidden wealth.

Ministers who commissioned the NEA will use it to re-shape planning policy.

"The natural world is vital to our existence, providing us with essentials such as food, water and clean air - but also cultural and health benefits not always fully appreciated because we get them for free," said Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.

"The UK NEA is a vital step forward in our ability to understand the true value of nature and how to sustain the benefits it gives us."

The economic benefits of nature are seen most clearly in food production, which depends on organisms such as soil microbes, earthworms and pollinating insects.

If their health declines - as is currently happening in the UK with bees - either farmers produce less food, or have to spend more to produce the same amount.

Either way there is an economic impact; and on average, the costs are growing over time.

Degrading report

"Humans rely on the way ecosystems services control our climate - pollution, water quality, pollination - and we're finding out that many of these regulating services are degrading," said Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and co-chairman of the NEA.

"About 30% of the key ecosystem services that we rely on are degrading.

"About 20% are getting better, however - our air quality has improved a lot - and what this report says is that we can do a lot better across the board," he told BBC News.

The 1940s saw the beginning of a national drive to increase production of food and other products such as timber.

Although that was successful, the NEA finds there was a price to pay - England, for example, has the smallest percentage of forest cover anywhere in Europe, while many fish stocks are below optimum levels.

The report says the problem arises largely because currently, only material products such as food carry a pricetag in the market.

By calculating the value of less tangible factors such as clean air, clean water and natural flood defences, it hopes to rebalance the equation.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) welcomed the assessment.

"The traditional view of economic growth is based on chasing GDP, but in fact we will all end up richer and happier if we begin to take into account the true value of nature," said its conservation director, Martin Harper.

"Of course no-one can put a pounds and pence value on everything in nature - but equally we cannot ignore the importance of looking after it when we are striving for economic growth."

The NEA seeks to include virtually every economic contribution from eight types of landscape, such as woodlands, coasts and urban areas.

It also provides some local flavours by looking at variations across the UK.

Some figures emerge with precision, such as the £430m that pollinating insects are calculated to be worth, or the £1.5bn pricetag on inland wetlands, valued so high because they help to produce clean water.

Other aspects of the evaluation are less precise because the costs and benefits are harder to quantify, and may change over time.
World view

Ian Bateman, an economist from the University of East Anglia who played a principal role in the analysis, said that putting a single price on nature overall was not sensible.

"Without the environment, we're all dead - so the total value is infinite," he said.

"What is important is the value of changes - of feasible, policy-relevant changes - and those you can put numbers on."

The full 2,000-page report is stacked full of such numbers. The government intends to use some of them in its forthcoming Natural Environment White Paper and other initiatives that could reform urban and rural planning.

Professor Watson said this did not imply an end to development, but that costs and benefits of each proposed development could be assessed more accurately in advance.

"Urban green space, for example, is unbelievably important - if affects the value of houses, it affects our mental wellbeing.

"This report is saying 'this has got incredible value, so before you start converting green space into building, think through what the economic value is of maintaining that green space' - or the blue space, the ponds and the rivers."

On the global stage, several countries have previously evaluated the economic worth of specific factors such as forests or fisheries.

And two international studies - the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) - have given broader views of society's environmental trajectory, and the costs and benefits.

But the UK is the first nation to produce such a detailed assessment across the piece.

Britain puts price on nature
Yahoo News 2 Jun 11;

LONDON (AFP) – Britain has put a price on the benefits of parks, lakes and wildlife for the first time in a government-commissioned study released on Thursday attempting to make the financial case for protecting nature.

It says the health benefits of simply living near to a green space are worth up to £300 ($500, 340 euros) per person per year.

The assessment showed that until now, the focus has been solely on the market value of resources that can be exploited and sold, such as timber and food crops, while caring for the environment was seen as a cost.

This has meant some habitats and resources have been allowed to decline and degrade.

The National Ecosystem Assessment will be used to determine planning policy.

By highlighting the value of services such as views of urban parks and green spaces, it is hoped that developers will allow for more natural areas when planning housing developments.

Environment minister Caroline Spelman said: "The UK National Ecosystem Assessment is a vital step forward in our ability to understand the true value of nature and how to sustain the benefits it gives us."

However, Stephen Tapper, president of the Planning Officers Society, warned that quantifying the value of nature was "a slippery slope".

"Local spaces have an intrinsic value, they are cherished by their local communities and it's very difficult to put any financial value to that," he told BBC radio.

The study puts a precise value on some aspects of nature, while others are harder to define.

Inland wetlands are considered to be worth £1.5 billion for their benefits to water quality while bees and other insects which pollinate fruit and crops have a value of £430 million a year to British agriculture.

The study shows that a third of the services that nature provides to Britain, from fish stocks to the pollination of plants on farmland, are being damaged.

Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the environment ministry and co-chairman of the project, said: "Roughly 30 percent of all ecosystem services are still declining or degrading. We are going in the right direction but there's still a long way to go."

He said one of the big challenges was to balance the production of food and resources with sustaining the other 'services' nature provides.

Professor Ian Bateman, of the University of East Anglia and one of the study's lead authors, said the point of putting economic values on environmental goods and services was "to ensure their incorporation on equal footing with the market-priced goods which currently dominate decision-making.

"Without such representation we will get a persistence of the situation where we have these services being used as if they were free and had no value."