SINGAPORE—Economic value should be placed on biodiversity so that it could provide proper incentives and disincentives and become a tool to protect the ecosystem, experts at the Asean Conference for Biodiversity 2009 in Singapore last week said.

At the same time, a call was made for the creation of a body similar to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) to “strengthen scientific foundation for [biodiversity] advocacy,” and to “identify and harness effective champions” similar to former US Vice President Al Gore, who called the world’s attention to the ill effects of climate change, economics professor Cielito Habito of Ateneo de Manila University said in the conference.

The IPCC and Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for espousing the cause.

Rodrigo Fuentes, executive director of the Asean Center for Biodiversity who reported out on Friday the conference recommendations that covered the fields of economics of biodiversity, biodiversity and climate change, and access and benefits sharing, said it identified cross-cutting concerns that need to be given attention and focused on.

The recommendations from the conference will be submitted to the meeting of the Asean Senior Officials on the Environment, and to the 11th Asean Ministerial Meeting on the Environment this week in Singapore.

One of the concerns, he said, is the need to “further strengthen the interphase between science and policymaking” to be able “to form a robust basis in defining the appropriate policies that would ensure the conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of benefits of biodiversity resources.”

He said biodiversity needs to be linked to the issues of poverty alleviation and climate change, and, thus, has to be mainstreamed in the various sectors of government and society. 

“This means that we not only involve the traditional ministries of environment, but we have to get the agriculture, health, development, education, water, energy  and all other sectors, including private and business, committed to this cause,” he said.

There is also a need for a “more aggressive public-awareness effort to emphasize the message of conserving biodiversity and [ecosystem services] as a determinant of life,” Fuentes said.

Fuentes said in a earlier speech in the conference that the Asean region registered “impressive and dramatic progress” in the last 50 years, but this came with a “stiff price” in terms of “losing our biodiversity resources."

Of Asean’s 64,800 known species, he said 1,313 are endangered, 80 percent of coral reefs are at risk, and deforestation rates are at least twice higher than in other tropical areas.

Economics of biodiversity

Fuentes said, “Valuing biodiversity and the benefits derived from it is definitely important.” However, he added that there are still continuing debates on how value should be attached to biodiversity resources and ecosystem services.

“Many of the benefits of [ecosystem services] can be unquantifiable, and yet its contribution to human well-being is immeasurable,” Fuentes said.

He said the economics of biodiversity and ecosystem services must follow a framework where “there should be incentives for people to pay or be rewarded for the protection of  resources, and disincentives for the destruction of  resources.”

Among the recommendations in this field, Fuentes said, is to “promote ecosystem-services investments” by the private sector and governments which could become “tools for risk management,” and to promote competitive regional economies.

He said valuation should show a return on investment in ecosystem services, and support the delimitation and management, especially of marine protected areas.

Another is to “forge links between policy and science—integration of different fields—among social sciences, biology and economics [with transdisciplinary research as a basis for advocacy and decision-making support],” Fuentes said.

He added that incentives or mechanisms for economic activities, which rely more directly on ecosystem services, such as hydropower, should be prioritized, and incentives should be backed up by complementary regulation, such as a carrot-and-stick mechanism.

Biodiversity and climate change

Fuentes also said that experts have recognized that “climate change will exacerbate the many factors that are already endangering biodiversity in the Asean region,” and that much uncertainty still remains over the magnitude of climate change in the region, and how this will affect biodiversity resources.

The conference session on climate change, which explored the impact of climate change on mangrove, coral- reef and tropical-forest ecosystems, Fuentes said, raised major areas that need urgent attention: the role of biodiversity, ecosystem services and the climate system; impacts of climate change on ecosystem services; and biodiversity adaptation measures.

A need for a more holistic accounting system on carbon credits, and to broaden existing agreements to cover forests and carbon credits was recommended. The experts, likewise, saw the need for international cooperation to curb the impact of climate change on coral reefs.

At the same time, they identified climate change, runoff and overfishing, among others, as the three big issues that have to be addressed together to protect biodiversity.

The human dimension to ecosystem dynamics was also raised. “We need to focus on the impact of people on ecosystems,” Fuentes said.

The experts recommended the need to implement ecosystems-based adaptation strategies, “so that humans and ecosystems will be better able to cope with risks associated with current climate and future climate change.” 

The conference also saw the need to consider going beyond ecosystem-based mitigation through the use of carbon sequestration through trees. Agroforestry, Fuentes said, mitigates climate change through carbon sequestration and helps enhance adaptive capacity.

Access and benefits sharing

Fuentes said “there were expressed sentiments” among the Asean experts in the conference to have the current consultation process on the “Draft Asean Framework Agreement on Access to, and Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from the Utilization of Biological and Genetic Resources” be continuously supported and adopted in the region as its contribution to the international Convention on Biological Diversity.

He said it was recommended that the respective negotiating parties of governments in Asean ensure that the agreement is adopted at the Conference of Parties 10 on biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010.