Every day, we use materials from the earth without
thinking, for free. But what if we had to pay for their true value:
would it make us more careful about what we use and what we waste? Think
of Pavan Sukhdev as nature's banker -- assessing the value of the
Earth's assets. Eye-opening charts will make you think differently about
the cost of air, water, trees ...
In 2008, Pavan Sukhdev took a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank, where
he'd worked for fifteen years, to write up two massive and convincing
reports on the green economy. For UNEP, his "Green Economy Report"
synthesized years of research to show, with real numbers, that
environmentally sound development is not a bar to growth but rather a
new engine for growing wealth and creating employment in the face of
persistent poverty. The groundbreaking TEEB report (formally “The
Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity”) report counts the global
economic benefits of biodiversity. It encourages countries to develop
and publish "Natural capital accounts" tracking the value of plants,
animal, water and other "natural wealth" alongside traditional financial
measures -- in the hope of changing how decisions are made to take into
account damage or preservation of biodiversity. Sukhdev is the current McCluskey Fellow at Yale University where he leads the TEEB@YALE graduate seminar.
Sukhdev chairs the Global Agenda Council on Biodiversity and Ecosystems
for the World Economic Forum, and was the Special Advisor and Head of
UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative. He says: "You cannot manage what you do not measure."
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