资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

From mangroves shielding a storm-prone coast to peatlands locking up megatons of carbon and landscapes coated in life-giving soil: Earth’s ecosystems have massive value. But that value is hard to measure and often gets ignored – with alarming consequences for the environment.

UNEP’s report Becoming #Generation Restoration found that half of the world’s GDP is dependent on nature, and every dollar invested in restoration creates up to 30 dollars in economic benefits.

Now, new tools are available to gauge the worth of nature and its many benefits to people, enabling governments and other decision-makers to consider Earth’s “natural capital” alongside its human and manufactured counterparts and step up efforts to restore it.

“Climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution prove that a narrow focus on conventional economic growth cannot deliver the quality of life that we want for ourselves and future generations,” said Pushpam Kumar, Chief Environmental Economist at UNEP. “We must take all of Earth’s gifts into account as we shift towards sustainability.”

Economic development has long been measured primarily using a country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Calculated annually, GDP sums the market value of the output of goods and services in a given country.

But experts say this metric’s lack of focus on environmental degradation has steered economic policy and investment in harmful directions, including a reliance on fossil fuels and growing inequality, and away from the fair and sustainable use of the planet’s finite resources.

“The critical decisions that we are faced with now, for instance on transforming our energy systems and saving biodiversity, need to be informed by much better measures than GDP,” Kumar said.