Kommentar af Rachel Kyte, Verdensbanken
Naturen og dens vældige ressourcer bør indgå som en del af nationernes velstand og det er ved at blive anerkendt af flere regeringer op til det store miljøtopmøde Rio+20 i juni.
We have all seen what happens when natural capital is undervalued.
Oceans that billions of people rely on for food and income get overfished and become dumping grounds for chemicals and waste. Mangroves that protect shorelines from storms are replaced with resorts.
Many countries are looking beyond GDP (brutto-nationalprodukt) to help them address the challenges undervaluing natural capital has created.
What they need is a measure of a country’s wealth that includes all of its capital – produced, social, human, and natural capital.
In Botswana at the Summit for Sustainability in Africa Friday, 10 African countries endorsed the need to move toward factoring (hvordan man indregner) natural capital into systems of national accounting (nationalregnskabet).
By Rio +20, the upcoming UN Conference on Sustainable Development, we hope to see 50 countries and 50 private corporations join this effort.
Africa has several examples of natural capital accounting already at work.
Botswana is piloting water accounts (regnskaber) that its government is using to determine how much water each sector of the economy is consuming and where that limited resource is possibly being overused. Knowing that information can help the government weigh economic tradeoffs and create effective incentives for water efficiency.
Biodiversity-rich Madagascar wants to know how to finance more than 60.000 square kilometers of protected areas. Natural capital accounting can help the country calculate the value of the forests in their entirety.
In all, at least 24 counties are using some form of natural capital accounting. For many low-income countries, natural capital is a critical asset (værdi) that makes almost 36 percent of their total wealth.
We have been talking about natural capital accounting for years, but until a few months ago, there was not an agreed methodology to move it forward. That changed when the UN Statistical Commission approved the System for Environmental and Economic Accounts.
SEEA provides methods for countries to account for natural resources like minerals, timber, and fisheries. The next step is to expand natural capital accounting to cover ecosystem services like the storm protection provided by mangroves.
Læs videre på
http://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/demystifying-natural-capital-accounting-10-african-countries-sign-on
Begynd fra: “A recent study of mangroves in Thailand…”
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Rachel Kyte er vicepræsident for bæredygtig udvikling i Verdensbanken i Washington D.C.
