Yale Environment 360: Value of Conserving Habitats Could be Worth $500B to World’s Poor

As we in the so-called first world countries go about our daily lives worrying about any number of things ranging from topics like the GMO/Organics debate, credit card debt, rise of gambling, increase in health related problems due to diet and the fact our lives are often less physically demanding than once upon a time and so on ... people in countries where access to wild habitats may be the only available resource for many are part of a conversation about survival... in whatever way is possible.

Image via here.

This article below therefore strikes me as precisely the conversation we in the 'first world countries' need to be considering. Where once it was possible to divorce oneself from how others were doing elsewhere around the globe, remaining insular, perhaps licking our lips in satisfaction at the spoils we could accumulate over a life time if we had the capacity, increasingly people are waking up to the horrendous cost of that ignorance.

The population debate is always in the background now but so increasingly is this one found via Biodiversity Library:

Yale Environment 360: Value of Conserving Habitats Could be Worth $500B to World’s Poor

Click on link to read or see Article here at e360 digest

20 JAN 2012: VALUE OF CONSERVING HABITATS
COULD BE WORTH $500B TO WORLD’S POOR

A new study says that compensating the world’s poorest communities for helping conserve the planet’s most vital habitats would help solve two major challenges: biodiversity loss and poverty. In fact, if global

Interview: Putting a Price
On the Value of Nature

In an interview with Yale e360, Indian bankerPavan Sukhdevdiscusses the ways natural ecosystems benefit people and why policymakers and businesses must rethink how they assess environmental costs and benefits.
READ THE e360 REPORT

leaders were to put an economic value on the preservation of the world’s biodiversity hotspots — including such benefits as providing food and water and absorbing carbon emissions — it could be worth more than $500 billion annually for 330 million of the world’s poorest people. Since the people who live near these resources typically don’t have the means to protect them, the urgency for such economic mechanisms becomes increasingly critical, according to the study, published in the journal BioScience. “Developed and developing economies cannot continue to ask the world’s poor to shoulder the burden of protecting these globally important ecosystem services for the world’s benefit,” said Will Turner, vice president of Conservation International and lead author of the study. An example of such a scheme is the UN-based REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative, which provides incentives to developing nations to prevent large-scale deforestation.