Aichi Biodiversity Targets and Global Economy

Global economy and biodiversity conservation

Dr. Marina Rosales Benites de Franco

The Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 found that all major pressures on biodiversity were increasing, as loss, degradation and fragmentation of natural habitats; overexploitation of biological resources; pollution, in particular the buildup of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus in the environment; the impacts of invasive alien species on ecosystems and the services they provide to people; and, climate change and acidification of the oceans, associated with the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These drivers of biodiversity loss have been leading and pushing ecosystems towards critical thresholds or tipping points. As a result, a broad range of services on which people depend for their livelihoods and well-being, are threatened. All societies and economies are affected. The Governments and society should to coordinate actions to addressing the direct and underlying causes or drivers of biodiversity loss. This coordination is related with applying Aichi Biodiversity Targets of Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011 – 2020.

The first reviews towards the attainment of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets progress have been assessed for Global Biodiversity Outlook 4 (GBO 4). The strategic goals are address underlying causes (goal A), reduce direct pressures (goal B), improve status (goal C), enhance benefits to all (goal D), and enhance implementation (goal E).

The GBO 4 gives the progress data to the Aichi Targets elements, on the base of five point scale the assessment,  it could consider 2% advances on track to exceed target; 8% advances on track to achieve target (if we continue on our current trajectory we expect to achieve the target by 2020);  62% advances on progress towards target but at an insufficient rate (to unless we increase our efforts the target will not be met by its deadline); 19% advances  no significant overall progress (we are neither moving towards the target nor moving away from it); and, 9% on moving away from target ( is on things are getting worse rather than better).

The global economy and its policies are related with these targets that no have significant overall progress and moving away from target. The targets are the following:

Goal A:

Target 3. Incentives, including subsidies, harmful to biodiversity, eliminated, phased out or reformed in order to minimize or avoid negative impacts.

Target 4. … and have kept the impacts of use of natural resources well within safe ecological limits.

Goal B:

Target 5. The loss of all habitats is at least halved and where feasible brought close to zero.

Target 6. Fisheries have no significant adverse impacts on threatened species and vulnerable ecosystems.

Target 6. The impacts of fisheries on stocks, species and ecosystems are within safe ecological limits.

Target 8. Pollution from excess nutrients has been brought to levels that are not detrimental to ecosystem function and biodiversity.

Target 9. Introduction and establishment of IAS prevented.

Target 10. Multiple anthropogenic pressures on coral reefs are minimized, so as to maintain their integrity and functioning.

Goal C:

Target 12. Extinction of known threatened species has been prevented.

Target 13. Genetic diversity of wild relatives is maintained.

Goal D:

Target 14. Ecosystems that provide essential services, including services related to water, and contribute to health, livelihoods and well-being, are restored and safeguarded …

Target 15. Ecosystem resilience and the contribution of biodiversity to carbon stocks have been enhanced through conservation and restoration.

The global economy as an international exchange of goods and services needs to evolve as an effective and efficient market. The global economy develops on ecosystems of nature and on social space, they are inseparable. The world economy is judged in monetary terms, but there are certain goods and ecosystems services that do not have economic values in the market.  This leads to maintain harmful subsidies to biodiversity and priories economic growth, without respect safe ecological limits. The consequences are loss habitats, threatened species, overexploitation and pollution.

The capital as that amount of wealth which is used in making profits and which enters into the accounts has two faces of the same coin, natural capital (ecosystems structure and its functions) and fixed and circulating capital. However, natural capital is not part of economic reserves (not only protected areas). It is important to think what is the vital task the Central Banks? The Central Bank has a big task, is maintain price stability, e.g. it aims to maintain inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term in the Eurozone. In the same sense, it is vital to economy maintain the ecosystems services stability; it aims to maintain them in its resilience capacity.

The circular flow of income, model of the economy  in which exchanges are represented as flows of money, goods and services, and others  between economic agents, do not consider explicitly the nature and its ecosystems. Main importance since the economic agents develop on the framework of ecosystems structured. It is relevant since the circular flow analysis is the basis of national accounts and hence of macroeconomics. As a result of this, the governments do not prioritize to build Ecosystem resilience to contribute to enhance carbon stock.

A market economy is the space and time in which decisions regarding investment, production, and distribution are based on supply and demand, and prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system. However, the market has externalities since societies and governments regulate market to varying degrees. The negative externalities costs are paying the present and future generations. The overexploitation, as fishery economics activities, pollution, ecosystems endangered, as coral reefs, and climate change are some of the results of these externalities.

The production do not include the cost of pollution treatment or remediation neither ecosystems restoration nor investments in nature infrastructure to distribute better on supply and demand and the prices. This lead the market failures in which the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient, there is not Pareto efficient.

In the other hand, the market should develop in the framework of moral and ethics values. Adam Smith would have tried to show that the moral values invoked to regulate economic activity would have been more fully realized by cities that regulate market.

Hence, there is need to self-regulate the safe ecological limits and the planetary boundaries, a green tax on the activity or, require to be included in the costing of those engaged in the economic activity, the environment cost to conserve goods and ecosystem services.

In this regard, the GBO 4 show us there have been drivers that governments had not yet been progress, related with the lack of environmental policies application to permit the economic flows run well within safe ecological limits and the planetary boundaries.

Finally, economic growth should have to a main goal the sustainable development, under the change of old paradigms that lead to human development and well being, maintaining the opportunities for future generations. The Gross Development Product should include natural capita, will be more realistic and can give us the opportunity to adapt and mitigate climate change considering it as a major driver of biodiversity loss and ecosystems change in this century.