We are pleased to announce that Sanjeev Sanyal, one of our Directors, has been named as a “Young Global Leader for 2010” by the World Economic Forum. Every year, the Davos based organization honors a select group of individuals below the age of 40 from around the world. This is to recognize young men and women for their contributions across of disciplines including politics, academia, sports, business, and art.
The Young Global Leaders are selected from thousands of nominations from around the world. The selection committee is headed by Her Majesty Queen Raina of Jordan and is composed of the world’s top media leaders. Honorees from previous years include Larry Page (co-founder of Google), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and Michael Schumacher. Previous Indian honorees include musician Anoushka Shankar, politicians Naveen Jindal and Rahul Gandhi and cricketer Sachin Tendulaker. The 2010 list includes tennis star Roger Federer and swimmer Ian Thorpe. The other Indians named this year include Minister Agatha Sangma and actor Nandita Das.
Mr. Sanjeev Sanyal (Director of GAISP) has been awarded the highly prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship. The Eisenhower Fellowship is headed by Colin Powell and the selection committee consists of George Bush Sr, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Victor Menezes, and Indra Nooyi amongst others. Previous fellows include four Prime Ministers/Presidents, 110 cabinet ministers, 250 CEOs. Sanjeev will be spending mid-Sept to mid-Nov touring the US to meet policymakers, academics, & corporate leaders. Sanjeev's main interest for this scholarship will be urban re-engineering of mega cities.
The Green Indian States Trusts enjoyed great success at the 9th Biennial Conference of The International Society For Ecological Economics, Dec 15th-18th 2006, New Delhi. The conference provided an occasion to showcase our work to a large number of academics, policy makers and government officials. Indeed our presentations were incredibly well received and both sessions full to capacity.
GIST has now forged links with United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP (and received a warm recommendation from the Executive Director, Mr. Achim Steiner) and the European Environment Agency (EEA). Prof. Jacqueline McGlade, the Executive Director of the EEA even mentioned GIST in her Plenary Address to the conference. Karl Goran Maler, (head of the Beijer Institute, and an authority on Green Accounting) attended both our sessions, and told us afterwards that our work "was the best empirical study of green accounting that (he) had seen". We also received a letter of support from Prof. Robert Costanza who was the founding member of the International Society for Ecological Economics.
Socially GIST also made an impact co-hosting a dinner for 650 delegates which was a great occasion for networking and raising our profile.
We hope to build on the momentum and exposure created by ISEE 2006 through the next year and have already felt its impact in terms of increased demand for our monographs from academics in India and abroad.
Mr.Pavan Sukhdev has been appointed Team leader of the study for the project on the economic challenges of the global loss of ecosystem and biodiversity. In March 2007, the G8+5 environment ministers met in Potsdam. Inspired by the momentum for early action and policy change created by the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, they expressed the need to explore a similar project on the economics of the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity. The Minister for the Environment in Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, with the support of the European Commissioner for the Environment, Stavros Dimas, took the lead and accepted the challenge of organizing this study.
The study /project The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity-“TEEB" looks at the following questions:
What will be the loss of biodiversity cost us in the long run.
How much do the national economies needs to invest now in order to stop the trend.
And what price do we have to pay if we do not act.
Mr.Pavan Sukhdev was commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMU) and the European Union. The BMU asked the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) to co-manage the scientific contribution to the study. In the first phase of the study, preliminary results have been presented during the 9th UN conference on Biological Diversity (COP9) in Bonn, Germany on 29th May 2008. Five thousand UN delegates from 190 countries gathered at Bonn from 19th to 30th May 2008. During the conference the primary focus was on discussing potential ways to halt the steady decline of biological diversity.
The first is that poverty and the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity are inextricably intertwined. The study explored who were the immediate beneficiaries of many of the services of ecosystems and biodiversity, and the answer is that it is mostly the poor. The livelihoods most affected are subsistence farming, animal husbandry, fishing and informal forestry – most of the world’s poor are dependent on them.
The second issue is of ethics – risks, uncertainty, and discounting the future, issues which have also been raised in the Stern Review. In most of the valuation studies the study examined, discount rates used were in the range 3-5% and higher. Note that a 4% discount rate means that we value a natural service to our own grandchildren (50 years hence) at one-seventh the utility we derive from it, a difficult ethical standpoint to defend. In Phase II the study shall address this issue by applying a discrete range of discount rates representing different ethical standpoints.
Phase II of TEEB sets out to conclude our scoping and exploratory work during Phase I and achieve four important objectives. These are to:
• Firm up and publish a “science and economics framework" which can help frame valuation exercises for most of Earth’s ecosystems, including in its scope all material values across the most significant biomes.
• Further evaluate and publish “recommended valuation methodology", including biomes (e.g. oceans) and some values (e.g. option values and bequest values) which have not been investigated in depth in Phase I.
• Engage all key “end-users" of our valuation work, early and comprehensively, to ensure that our output is as focused as possible on their needs, and “userfriendly" in terms of its organization, accessibility, practicability and, overall, its usefulness.
• Further evaluate and publish a policy toolkit for policy makers and administrators which supports policy reform and environmental impact assessment with the help of sound economics, in order to foster sustainable development and better conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity.
Urban Habitats Forum (UHF) is a public-private partnership between the India Habitat Centre (IHC) and Mirabilis Advisory Pvt Ltd. The Forum is a collaborative platform for multidisciplinary thinkers and change-makers to push for innovation in shaping the next generation cities in India. The Forum aims to mobilise action through intelligent discourse, impactful research and result-driven advocacy. For more details: www.habitatsummit.org
Launch Event for Monograph 7. India International Centre, New Delhi, 2nd August 2006
