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"The world's ecosystems are failing, forcing business and industry to green themselves or suffer the consequences."
Inter Press Service
TERRA VIVA
UN Journal Vol. 13 - No. 134
Published Monday through Friday since March 1993
Thursday, 21 July 2005A User's Guide to the Planet
Stephen LeahyBROOKLIN, Canada, Jul 20 (IPS) - The world's ecosystems are failing, forcing business
and industry to green themselves or suffer the consequences. Businesses, both large and
small, are dependent on services provided by ecosystems and those ecosystem services
are changing, according to a new report, 'Ecosystems and Human Well-being:
Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Industry'. ''We have destroyed some
ecosystems and lost the services they provide'', said Steve Percy, retired CEO of the oil
company BP America, and one of the report's co-authors.''This report is a wake-up call
for business and industry -- the ecosystem services they depend on are being eroded'',
Percy told IPS.
The report is one of several Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) synthesis reports
released this year. It is based on an unprecedented, four-year scientific assessment of the
Earth's ecosystems by 1,360 experts from 95 countries.
Those experts have concluded that 15 of the 24 ecosystem ''services'' that support life on
Earth are being degraded or used in an unsustainable fashion. And those findings have
enormous implications for the world's business. Ecosystem services such as seas full of
fish or clean water for agriculture that are freely available today will cease to exist or
become more costly in the near future if current decline continues, the report says.
Not only will costs and risks rise but customer preferences, stockholder expectations and
government regulations will all change, says Percy. For example, with tourism fast
becoming the world's largest employer and the economic dynamo in many developing
countries, natural areas will be seen as important assets for companies and countries.
''That will limit access to raw materials in such areas'', the report suggests. Business will
have to change how it does its planning for the future, he says. Traditional accounting
and business analyses often fail to value ecosystem services and tend to ignore long-term
impacts.
However, ignoring the MA findings could jeopardise the future of some operations.
Stock market investors and the insurance industry are beginning to understand these
risks and discount the value of companies that are not responding to these changes, he
said.
Ecologists and other scientists do not often talk to business and industry leaders and this
report, based on the best science available, explains the current trends in business terms,
says Jane Lubchenco, a professor of Marine Ecology at Oregon State University.
Businesses are as dependent on ecosystem services as much as people and need to know
how the changes will impact them, says Lubchenco, a co-author of the report. An
ecosystem is a complex dynamic of plants, animals, microorganisms and their
environment -- water, air, sunlight -- that interact as a functional unit. Those
interactions provide services that humans benefit from such as climate regulation,
pollination and water purification. An attempt to engineer these services in the 1991
Biosphere II experiment was an expensive failure.
Eight people were to be cut off from the world and live for two years inside a three-acre,
high-tech 200-million-dollar greenhouse. Not long after the doors were closed, oxygen
had to be pumped in and then shipments of food brought as the engineered ecosystems
failed one after another. At a cost of 70 million dollars, the Biosphere II provides a rough
estimate of the costs to duplicate what nature provides. And it didn't work.
Business leaders who have seen the report are very enthusiastic and see it as a window
into the future, she said in an interview.
The solutions of the past are often not robust enough under the conditions of global
change and need to be re-thought and re-implemented, Antony Burgmans, chairman of
Unilever N.V., a leading consumer products company, said in a statement.
Unilever is a financial sponsor of the report. The Millennium Assessment is a user's guide
to the planet for long-term thinkers, says Lubchenco. The Ecosystems and Human Well-
being synthesis report is an invaluable resource for business leaders in laying out the
threats and opportunities that will shape the economies of the future, she says.
And there are many new business opportunities for more efficient or different ways to
use ecosystem services and to mitigate impacts. Markets for carbon reduction credits are
opening up as a result of the Kyoto Protocol on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases
that cause climate change. The value of this carbon credit trading market is projected to
reach 40 billion dollars by 2010. Aquaculture will boom as the ocean's fish stocks
continue to decline. Public attention to the negative environmental impacts of
aquaculture operations means the companies that find sustainable ways to farm marine
and freshwater species will have a major competitive advantage, the report notes.
European companies have taken the lead in making money from green industries, but
that is starting to change, says Lubchenco. The General Electric (GE) corporation, the
biggest public-traded company in the United States, recently announced a new focus on
sustainable technologies. The company already makes solar energy products, low-energy
lighting and many other products. GE understands that they can make money from
selling green products because that is what the world needs right now, says Percy.
''There is a broad recognition that companies can be green and make money'', says
Steven Guilbeault of Greenpeace Canada.
''That does not mean corporate polluters such as GE should be let off the hook. They still
have to clean up the messes they've made and should be closely monitored'', Guilbeault
told IPS. There is a growing awareness by the public and government that climate
change is real and that ecosystems are in trouble and change is coming. Business leaders
better beware or the market will put them out of business, he said.
Surprisingly, former oil company CEO Percy echoes the Greenpeace activist's thoughts:
''Things are going to change''. ''I hope people in the boardrooms around the world will
read this report'', he said.
MILLENNIUM ECOSYSTEM ASSESSMENT
http://www.maweb.org/en/index.aspxECOSYSTEMS AND HUMAN WELL-BEING: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY
http://www.maweb.org/documents/PrivateSectorFinal.pdf GREENPEACE CANADA
http://www.greenpeace.ca 
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