Britain calls on the world to put a price on nature

Every country in the world should measure ‘natural capital’ as well as GDP in order to create a global economy that values the environment as well as money, Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman will say.

Caroline Spelman, the UK Environment Secretary, said all countries should measure the state of natural resources as well as finances. Photo: PHILIP HOLLIS

By Louise Gray , Environment Correspondent

The Telegraph (UK), 11 February 2012

The UK Government is setting up a Natural Capital Committee reporting to the Treasury that will work out our own wealth in terms of air quality, fresh water, wildlife and other natural resources.

Now Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, is going to propose that all countries begin “green accounting” that will audit the state of a nation’s rivers, forests and other landscapes.

The initiative fits in neatly with David Cameron’s efforts to outgun Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, in measuring happiness as well as GDP and makes the UK a key player at the Rio +20 conference in Brazil this June.

The conference, held 20 years after the ground-breaking 1992 Earth Summit, that launched the modern green movement, is expected to unite the world to protect the environment in the same way that the Millennium Development Goals have driven the fight against poverty.

‘Sustainable Development Goals on the table include ensuring all agriculture is sustainable, protecting oceans, setting up an international court on environmental crime and appointing a “ombudsperson” or high commissioner to speak on future generations.

The United Nations summit, attended by 190 nations, will also look at cutting subsidies for fossil fuels and low carbon energy for all.

Mrs Spelman said the first step towards sustainable development is knowing what to protect.

She used bees as an example. She explained that the services of pollinators are worth £400 million to the UK every year but this can only be sustained by also protecting habitat such as wildflowers.

“A snapshot of the state of economies based on GDP (gross domestic product) is too narrow,” she said. “Green accounting would work for all countries. We believe you can really drive significant ‘greening’ if you take proper account of the value of natural capital in your government accounts,” she added.

A separate initiative by the Office of National Statistics is already looking at ways to measure GWB or general wellbeing so that a nation’s “happiness” is recorded.

The idea is to eventually report ‘GDP+’ to give an idea of the state of Britain’s environment and the population’s levels of contentment as well as its financial state.

The trend for questioning the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a way to measure the real sate of a nation was first proposed in academia and taken up by world leaders including Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President.

However it will be the UK leading the way on the environmental aspect by being the first nation to look seriously at green accounting.

It is hoped that the findings of the Natural Capital Committee will one day feed into national policy on building infrastructure, education and health.

Mrs Spelman said businesses are already measuring the impact they are having on the environment such as carbon emissions and water use.

In the same way governments can start to take account of damage to the environment in order to sustain resources like fresh water for fisheries, forests for clean air and green spaces for tourism.

“We want to advocate corporate accounting for sustainability, so that is right across the private sector, enabling investors and shareholders to understand if the company [they are] investing in is making an effort to take sustainability seriously,” she said.

“In terms of government accounting, we want our own government to take account of natural capital and we want our statisticians to calculate the state of the nation more widely.”

“We believe you can drive significant greening if you take proper account of the value of natural capital in your government accounts,” she told reporters. “We will be urging British business that advocate accounting for sustainability to go [to Rio] and share the way that they do it.”

Thanks to the Earth Policy Institute for this recent release.

January 31, 2012

2011: A Year of Weather Extremes, with More to Come

Janet Larsen and Sara Rasmussen
The global average temperature in 2011 was 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.14 degrees Fahrenheit). According to NASA scientists, this was the ninth warmest year in 132 years of recordkeeping, despite the cooling influence of the La Niña atmospheric and oceanic circulation pattern and relatively low solar irradiance. Since the 1970s, each subsequent decade has gotten hotter-and 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the twenty-first century.

Each year’s average temperature is determined by a number of factors, including solar activity and the status of the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon. But heat-trapping gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, have become a dominant force, pushing the Earth’s climate out of its normal range. The planet is now close to 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century ago. Hidden within annual averages and expected variability are startling instances of new temperature and rainfall records in many parts of the world-weather extremes that would once be considered anomalies but that now risk becoming the new norm as the Earth heats up.

Read Full Article

Article in The Scientist explores new ways of involving people in scientific research or citizen science, often using crowdsourcing to gather data that would take a few scientists in a Lab many years to accumulate. Read Article

Tim Kassner with the New American Dream offers a short look at Materialism.

Watch the video

Link to article from 2006

We (Still) Want Bread, and Roses Too
The centennial of the famous strike in Lawrence, Mass., reminds us that our fight is about more than economics.
posted Jan 10, 2012

A century ago, in what has come to be known as the Bread and Roses strike, a group of women walked out of the Lawrence, Mass., textile mill where they worked.

A new law had limited their working hours to 54 a week, two fewer than most of them had been working—so far, so good. But mill owners responded by decreasing the women’s weekly wage, a difference that would cost their already hungry families a loaf of bread a day.

So the women demanded a pay raise of two cents an hour—from 16 to 18 cents—so they could buy enough bread; they also demanded extra pay for overtime work. During the following days and weeks, thousands of workers, most of them immigrant women, joined them in the streets.

Somehow, we came to believe we could live on “bread” alone; the roses are left to wilt.The women faced clubs, bayonets, and frequent arrests. Many were hauled off to jail, children in tow. One, Annie LoPizzo, was shot and killed by the police. Still, they kept up the strike for two months, while national sympathy for their cause grew. Finally, in March, the mill owners conceded to their demands.

Today, the strike is remembered for a slogan that the women were reported to have used on their banners: “We want bread, and roses, too!” The slogan comes from a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim. A hundred years later, its words might speak for the Occupy movement:
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes[…]
Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.

Hearts starve as well as bodies. It’s an old message from our religious traditions, and one the Bread and Roses centennial should call back to our attention.

Read the Full Article from Yes! Magazine

Measuring for the Future
An overview of measurements of progress
and sustainability on the state-level

Read this overview report by the New Economics Institute (PDF)