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:
1. What will be the loss of biodiversity cost us in the long run.
2. How much do the national economies needs to invest now in order to stop the trend.
3. 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. |
