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"You can not manage what you do not measure."
- Pavan Sukhdev |
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| HIGHLIGHTS OF PHASE I |
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.
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