Investing in biodiversity would win huge benefits, says CIFOR’s Robert Nasi - CIFOR Forests News
https://forestsnews.cifor.org/...ing-in-biodiversity-would-win-huge-benefits-says-cifors-robert-nasi
while conserving biodiversity, we will expect a certain standard of living — a decent standard of living.
For that, we need to produce goods and services, which means that we must mainstream biodiversity into the productive sector. That is something that is very important that we can do, and we can do it with benefits.
Some sectors are of course, directly impacted by biodiversity, big agriculture is on borrowed time from biodiversity for pollination, for pest control, for plant growth.
Others, like the energy sector, which is largely dependent on fossil fuels, may also believe that they are immune to biodiversity loss. But they are fooling themselves because without biodiversity they will not survive either.
As well as conserving what is left by mainstreaming biodiversity into our production sector, we also need to restore all that has been degraded.
We need to turn restoration into an enterprise that creates jobs, services and livelihoods on top of restoring biodiversity.
Empirical data show that if one dollar is invested in restoration there is a return of $7 to $10, so the question is, why are we not doing it.
...
Each year, we spend about $500 billion on subsidies for fossil fuel, about $600 billion dollars on agricultural subsidies and about $1.3 trillion on military expenditures.
And if you draw a parallel and consider the current pandemic, it is obvious that spending this amount of money did not help us to win the war against COVID-19.
When we bailed out the banks after the 2008 financial collapse, the direct amount was around $1 trillion, but the actual cost to society is estimated at $16 trillion
What these numbers show is that we do have money, but we have to re-prioritize where it is invested.
If we wanted to invest in conserving biodiversity we could.
Estimates indicate that the amount needed is about $80 billion a year, and to restore degraded land, between $40 to $50 billion a year would be enough.
So, if you look at what we are spending on subsidies, bailing out banks and on weapons of mass destruction, we could well have saved the biodiversity of the world several times and restored our land a couple of times, too.
We all need to sit around the table: Indigenous Peoples; local communities; the private sector; the public sector and civil society.
Those that will not sit at the table will quickly end up on the menu.
We have enough knowledge to do what must be done. We have enough money.
If we want to invest the money into biodiversity, climate change and land restoration, we know that there is a massive return to be made in the medium to long term that will dwarf any money that we spend now.
So, the existential question is why we are not doing it.
We can do it.