By Zachary Shahan •
November 13, 2009
A new report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), attempts to bring to the world’s attention the truly great economic value of ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as the benefits of taking these into account when making policies.
The value of the world’s natural ecosystems and biodiversity is something lacking in most economic analyses. Lack of value for what is truly priceless doesn’t just hurt the environment, however. It is also a sort of economic suicide. This new report, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme and supported by key EU, UK, German, Swedish, Dutch, and Norwegian bodies, attempts to bring all of this to our attention more and show some positive case studies of how taking the environment into consideration can actually save us money.
As the report says: “the failure of markets to adequately consider the value of ecosystem services is of concern not only to environment, development and climate change ministries but also to finance, economics and business ministries.”
Good news for the Visayan Spotted Deer, Cervus alfredi, said to be the rarest deer in the world. Evidence of two groups of the rare deer was found on the Philippine Islands. A team of specialists from the Negros Interior Biodiversity Expedition (NIBE) found evidence of the deer at the North Negros Natural Park (NNNP) during the very first biological expedition at the park.
By Lucille Chi •
June 9, 2009
I’m simply smitten with the current issue of Coco Eco Magazine which features:
- the first yearly International Eco Couture issue.
- ways to stay safe in the sun, from eco-sunscreens to special skin treats!
- a sexy Leila Hafzi outdoor eco-fashion shoot by the shore.
- the hottest green fashion stars in London.
- awesome highlights from fashion designers in the Philippines that design clothing with their traditional pineapple fiber.
- the head of the Humane Society up close.
- a worldwide fair-trade section.
- a complementary guide to San Francisco.
- unique eco-retreat highlights.
By Derek Markham •
April 9, 2009
Fishermen based in Donsol, the Philippines, caught one of the world’s rarest sharks, the megamouth (Megachasma pelagios), in a trawling net on March 30th.
The megamouth is so rare that each one gets numbered, and only 40 other sitings have ever been recorded, making this shark number 41.
Not a lucky number for this one, as it ended up as dinner.
Fishermen in the Philippines accidentally caught and later ate one of the rarest sharks in the world - the megamouth shark.
Only 40 others have been encountered, the World Wildlife Fund said Tuesday. The 1,100-pound, 13-foot megamouth died while struggling in the fishermen’s net on March 30 off Burias island in the central Philippines.
Okay, fishing nets kinda suck!
By Lester R. Brown
In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo “ordered the military and police to crack down on illegal logging, after flash floods and landslides, triggered by rampant deforestation, killed nearly 340 people,” according to news reports. Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin. Each of these governments had belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the earth’s forested area was estimated at 5 billion hectares. Since then it has shrunk to just under 4 billion hectares, with the remaining forests rather evenly divided between tropical and subtropical forests in developing countries and temperate/boreal forests in industrial countries. Since 1990, the developing world has lost some 13 million hectares of forest a year. This loss of about 3 percent each decade is an area roughly the size of Greece. Meanwhile, the industrial world is actually gaining an estimated 5.6 million hectares of forestland each year, principally from abandoned cropland returning to forests on its own and from the spread of commercial forestry plantations. Thus, net forest loss worldwide exceeds 7 million hectares per year.
Unfortunately, even these official data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) do not reflect the gravity of the situation. For example, tropical forests that are clearcut or burned off rarely recover. They simply become wasteland or at best scrub forest, yet they still may be counted as “forest” in official forestry numbers. Plantations, too, count as forest area, yet they also are a far cry from the old-growth forest they sometimes replace.
