Word: unepic
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...biodiversity loss, then, be seen as a failure of the market? "Biodiversity is the living capital of the planet," says Pavan Sukhdev, a senior banker with Deutsche Bank and Special Adviser to the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Green Economy Initiative. Like any capital, he says, it has to be measured to be managed. "If you don't count half of your balance sheet, you're going to get your profit and loss ratio incorrect - and we have...
Sukhdev, who's also Study Leader for a UNEP initiative called The Economics of Ecosystems and Diversity (TEEB), says that currently "the economic value attached to nature is zero. Our metrics are geared toward consumption and production of man-made goods and services, and we tend to gloss over nature." This, he says, has led to "bad accounting" which, in turn, has contributed to rapid biodiversity loss...
...focus on wind continues, but today Riso - now part of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) - is a global leader in hydrogen fuel-cell research, which could eventually provide a viable storage technology to counter the challenge of intermittent renewables like wind. "Environmental technology is something that can drive industrial exports for Denmark," says John Christensen, head of the UNEP Riso Centre on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development. "We can and should take advantage of this...
...report, the U.N. Environment Program said water shortages already affected 400 million people and predicted that number would multiply tenfold by 2050. At that time, more than a sixth of the world's population, 1.1 billion people, had erratic supplies of clean water or none at all. UNEP chief Klaus Toepfer warned in an accompanying statement that "the next war could be a war [over] water...
Predictably, things have gotten worse since then. Robert Diaz, an ecologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia who helped UNEP with its numbers, reports in the current issue of the journal Science that today there are more than 400 known dead zones along coastlines around the world, covering roughly 95,000 sq. mi. of seabed. Some of the dead zones that Diaz and his Swedish co-author identify in their review have been around for some time, but have only recently been studied. Many others appear to be new. About 8% of them, mainly those...