Inglês

Nature Inc.

Return of the groundbreaking series that puts a price-tag

on environmental services.

The series kicks off with Natural Prevention, a reckoning

of how an investment in natural barriers such as marshes and

mangroves to tsunamis and hurricanes can save billions of dollars

as well as thousands of lives. Nature has spent billions of years

developing how to do the most with the least, comments one

scientist in the programme.

The last programme in the six part series — Now and

Forever — looks ahead to Copenhagen and the major climate

conference convened to replace the Kyoto agreement.

We feature the scary number crunching of former

World Bank chief economist, Nicholas Stern, who has worked out

that climate change, if it's business as usual, could by 2100 cost

up to 20% of World GDP. Taking action by contrast, would cost

just 2%, says programme producer, Ken Pugh.

Already according to the assessment of a new UN study

set to report in 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, we

are losing over US$ 4 trillion in so-called ecosystem services

every year.

Interviewed by Nature Inc., the UN study leader and a

former Deutsche Bank manager, Pavan Sukhdev, says: These

sums are staggering and represent the real credit crunch.

Interviewed at the World Conservation Union

headquarters in Switzerland, IUCN director general Julia MartonLefevre

also tells Nature Inc.: We have seen around the world

the credit crunch is very real — but for a long time now there has

also been a nature crunch going on — and it's far bigger, but the

world hasn't realized it yet.

Nature Inc. also spends a day in Washington DC with

UNEP executive director, Achim Steiner, as he finds support

from an unexpected quarter — the American trade unions that

have begun to accept that investments in energy efficiency can

help safeguard jobs.

Achim Steiner, tells Nature Inc.: I believe the green

economy is already happening all over the planet.

In all the programmes, Nature Inc. addresses the

conundrum that while everyone accepts that conservation has an

economic value, the unregulated free market cannot really fix a

workable monetary value on ecosystem services, says series

editor Robert Lamb, a veteran of environmental programming for

25 years.

But what is interesting is that the green calculations of

wealth that 10 years ago would have been dismissed out of hand

by most establishment economists are now widely accepted.

The root of the word 'economy' is 'ecology', perhaps it's all

turning full circle?

The 'triple crunch' of climate, credit, and energy

insecurity, is forcing governments to seriously consider the green

economy as a way of making a sustainable recovery.

The recent London G20 Summit emphasized that

investment in environmentally sound technology and business

could also create sustainable jobs.

Nature Inc. goes to China, India, USA, Spain,

Bangladesh and Colombia to examine the claim that green

investment equals green jobs.

BBC World News (adapted).

Acording to the ideas expressed in the text above, judge the

following items.

Staggering ecosystem services epitomize a reduction in the

general availability of loans or credit, due to the four-billiondollar

deficit per year.