GDP should also include ecosystem cost: Ramesh

There is a need to include the improvement or damage to a country’s ecosystem in computing gross domestic product (GDP), Jairam Ramesh, minister of state for environment and forests, said on Tuesday. He hoped India would adopt such a system by 2015.

Releasing a report by the UN-backed TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), Ramesh said GDP, as calculated now, does not take into account the “wear and tear” of natural resources or endowments and stressed the need for substituting the conventional GDP with a “green domestic product”.

Pavan Sukhdev, a senior official in Deutsche Bank and founder-director of Green Indian States Trust (GIST), led the team preparing the report. Sukhdev said the study aims to “examine the economic costs of biodiversity decline and the costs and benefits of actions to reduce these losses”.

An interim report prepared by the team estimated that the current loss of global natural capital was worth $2-4.5 trillion per year. It has also been estimated that for an annual investment of $45 billion in protected areas alone, the world could secure the delivery of ecosystem services worth around $5 trillion a year.

Ashok Khosla, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said on the occasion that the value of ecosystem services worldwide had been estimated at $33 trillion.

Speaking about the economic value of the ecosystems, he said 35% of the food consumed by humans came from plants pollinated by wild pollinators.