Minister of Finance called for further development of economic instruments to protect nature

On the 15th of February the Ministry of Environment published this article on their web page:

"Sigbjørn Johnsen, Minister of Finance, held the closing address at the sixth Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity. The Conference was attended by more than 300 participants form almost 100 countries representing governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and scientific and academic institutions.

Over the five-day meeting, participants discussed status and lessons learned from the current Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 2010 target and setting post 2010 targets, including emerging issues and challenges for addressing drivers of biodiversity loss.

Johnson explained that in Norway, the finance ministry coordinates sustainable development work and that biodiversity is an important part of this strategy as biological diversity is required for meeting these goals and ensuring intergenerational equity. He highlighted the fair access and benefit sharing and the elimination of harmful subsidies. He called for further development of economic instruments to protect nature and stated that the value of economic of biodiversity is often underestimated or ignored."

You can read the whole speech from the seminar here.

It makes me exited that this now seems to be a growing issue in the Norwegian Government but also in the EU.

On the CITY AS BIOTOPE course last autumn I worked a lot around the issues regarding the economics of nature-service and biodiversity.

DISPOSING OF FUTURE RESOURCES

"Biodiversity matters for Ethical, Emotional, Environmental and Economics. Ecosystems have intrinsic value. They provide emotional and aesthetic experiences. They offer outstanding opportunities for recreation. They clean our water, purify our air and maintain our soils. They regulate the climate, recycle nutrients and provide us with food. They provide raw materials and resources for medicines and other purposes. They form the foundation on which we build our societies.
...Human well-being is dependent upon "ecosystem services" provided by nature for free, such as water and air purification, fisheries, timber and nutrient cycling. These are predominantly public goods with no markets and no prices, so their loss often is not detected by our current economic incentive system and can thus continue unabated. A variety of pressures resulting from population growth, changing diets, urbanisation, climate change and many other factors is causing biodiversity to decline, and ecosystems are continuously being degraded. The world’s poor are most at risk from the continuing loss of biodiversity, as they are the ones that are most reliant on the ecosystem services that are being degraded."
from the Biodivercity Policy of the European Commission

Biodiversity makes ecosystems//communeties//cities more flexible. So how will Bergen plan for the keeping and growth of the richness within our neighbourhoods? And what economic loss/gain is the potential for some sites historically and for the future? Planning and making smart choices for our selves and our descendants...

resource : water
green aeras // parks
preserved natural places
transitional spaces
undeveloped spaces

See here for my whole text on this topic.

Further interesting reading on the topic;

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB)
by Pavan Sukhdev for the German Federal Ministry for the Environment and the European Commission