Business and Biodiversity Initiative

Placing an economic value on biodiversity is difficult.  Is an area of ongoing study and new bits of information are always welcome.

The Kerr Centre for Sustainable Agriculture has released a report called 'mourning the loss of biodiversity' with some interesting facts in it worth sharing.

About the decline in biodiversity:

"The FAO (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates that since the beginning of this century, about seventy five percent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost"

And the value of ecosystem services:

"Besides the animals and plants that we use for food, shelter, raw materials, and companionship, there are thousands of species whose natural products are literally life-saving -- nearly 25 percent of the drugs used in the United States originally came from plants."

25% is a larger number than I would have expected. More on a general level:

"The quality of the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the soil in which we grow our food all depend on the integrity of natural ecosystems. People have long recognized the role of healthy forests, for example, in reducing erosion, preventing flooding, maintaining the purity of the water, and tempering climatic fluctuations"

The summary of the report is pretty brief, and has some other interesting stats about the rise of GM in the US (the use of GM was recently banned here in Germany).  Both the full report and the summary page are available here.

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