The new body would be called the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). It would try to put a price on the services that nature provides to the human economy: water filtration by forests, pollination by bees and a supply of wild plant genes for new food crops or medicines.

Most such values are excluded from corporate balance sheets and Gross National Product measures of national economies and from prices and markets which would force businesses and governments to recognise them. The result, says the U.N., has been a bias toward development over conservation.

Damage to natural capital including forests, wetlands and grasslands is valued at $2-4.5 trillion annually, U.N. reports estimate, a figure excluded from measures of the global economy, or GDP.

Of 48,000 species assessed for extinction risk as of 2009, some 2% were already extinct or extinct in the wild, says the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Pavan Sukhdev, the study leader for the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) U.N. initiative, says the first thing to do is to measure the extent of the resources. TEEB published a business and biodiversity report this week. This report was commissioned by the G8 and five major developing economies.

"For a country to say 'let's increase biodiversity', it's quite difficult because it's not measuring biodiversity," Sukhdev said. "That is a big challenge for the IPBES, to create a right set of metrics. The logical sequence is first establish what is biodiversity, what are you measuring, agree on it, so that countries are doing it pretty much the same way."

The U.N. General Assembly is expected officially to endorse IPBES later this year.

Risks to business
Sukhdev also said, "There are both serious risks to business, as well as significant opportunities, associated with biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. There is also a need for business to quantify and value its impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems, in order to manage these risks and opportunities and enable a better future for all.

"Evaluations of any kind are a powerful ‘feedback mechanism’ for a society which has distanced itself from the biosphere, upon which its very health and survival depends."

The new body will be "bringing the world's best scientists together under an inter-governmental body, so governments can commission specific questions to that body, to provide them with guidance," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The TEEB report
The TEEB report contains the following key action points for business:

  1. Identify the impacts and dependencies of your business on biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES)
  2. Assess the business risks and opportunities associated with these impacts and dependencies
  3. Develop BES information systems, set SMART targets, measure and value performance, and report your results
  4. Take action to avoid, minimize and mitigate BES risks, including in-kind compensation (‘offsets’) where appropriate
  5. Grasp emerging BES business opportunities, such as cost-efficiencies, new products and new markets
  6. Integrate business strategy and actions on BES with wider corporate social responsibility initiatives
  7. Engage with business peers and stakeholders in government, NGOs and civil society to improve BES guidance and policy.

The report cites as a model that less direct, private sector opportunities indirectly tied to conservation are booming, such as eco-tourism and organic food.

Abyd Karmali, Managing Director, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said, "The U.N.'s TEEB report is a critical contribution to the debate on how capital markets can play a role in addressing the alarming rate of loss of biodiversity. At Bank of America Merrill Lynch, we believe that Rainforest Bonds underpinned by the emerging markets for ecosystem services could be one innovative solution to this challenge."

Helping poor countries get benefit

On the agenda at a U.N. meeting in October in Japan is a plan to give countries a share of profits from product development based on plants in their territory. This "access and benefit-sharing" regime would cover plants and other species valued by agriculture or the pharmaceutical industry.

"It has major implications for the economic benefit of conserving biodiversity," said Steiner.

In the fight against climate change, a pure market approach has been devised to put a value on carbon-free air in the European Union's emissions trading scheme, by generating tradable carbon permits.

While some of nature's services could be similarly traded as commodities, such as proposed "rainforest bonds" which would pay for forests' wildlife, fresh water and carbon storage, most biodiversity cannot be valued or traded directly.

"We should probably be thinking about biodiversity less like the carbon market and more like a real estate market, these are very distinctive, unique assets, they can be graded and valued but they're not interchangeable," said Joshua Bishop, chief economist at the IUCN.

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