In a move with potentially substantial ramifications for future sustainable development, 10 African nations have agreed to begin assigning monetary value to the benefits provided by non-commodity natural resources, including ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, and coral reefs.
Botswana, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, and Tanzania each affirmed their support for the “Gaborone Declaration” during last month’s Summit for Sustainability in Africa, co-hosted by Conservation International and the government of Botswana. The goal, according to Botswanan President Ian Khama, is to include these new valuations in national accounting, providing policymakers a clear perspective on the costs and benefits associated with the development or conservation of their natural resources for the first time.
Coming just prior to the Rio+20 conference, the signatories said they hoped assigning calculable costs to resource usage would encourage more sustainable development by bringing hitherto “invisible” costs and externalities into the open and onto the balance sheet.
Though the challenges of properly assessing the values of various ecosystem services are understandably many, the potential benefits of natural capital accounting are substantial.
According to SciDev.Net, the World Bank’s Vice President for Sustainable Development Rachel Kyte spoke in support of the declaration at the summit. She pointed out, for example, the advantage of knowing that a hectare of mangrove trees in a certain region of Thailand has been calculated to provide approximately $16,000 of flood protection when considering whether to clear-cut and sell the raw wood (worth about $850), convert the region into a shrimp farm ($9,000), or preserve it.
Such accounting may be particularly beneficial to the Gaborone signatories and other African nations, given growing concern among experts about foreign investment in land, natural resources, and even water on the continent.
But the declaration – and the very idea of natural capital accounting – is not without controversy.
Some argue that commodifying such resources will actually encourage their destruction rather than protect them by ascribing monetary values to previously free and shared resources, thus advantaging richer stakeholders and nations at the expense of poorer ones. As Hannah Griffiths of the UK-based World Development Movement recently wrote in The Guardian, “the result [of natural resource accounting] would be the further privatisation of essential elements of our planet to which we all share rights and have responsibilities.”
Along these lines, Nigerian environmental activist and chair of Friends of the Earth International, Nnimmo Bassey, has voiced his strenuous opposition to the plan made at the summit. “This declaration is blind to the fact that the bait of revenue from natural capital is simply a cover for continued rape of African natural resources,” he said in SciDev.
However, the signatories of the Gaborone Declaration dismissed these concerns and pointed to the value of natural resource accounting for sustainable development.
“Africa is where sustained and sustainable economic growth and stewardship of natural wealth become one and the same thing,” said Kyte at the summit. “By endorsing natural capital accounting as a tool for delivering on more inclusive green growth, Africa is showing the way for the rest of the world.”
Conservation International CEO and Chairman Peter Seligmann agreed, calling the declaration “a very big deal, a very big moment, and a big step forward.” He connected it to the imminent Rio+20 conference as well, saying the pledge is “truly a beacon on the hill for the rest of societies” and that “it will be held up on top of that hill in Rio de Janeiro.”
Indeed, the World Bank has listed natural capital accounting as one of six key issues for Rio+20, and in a report last month titled Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development, noted that “it is vital that economic values for environmental assets be comparable to other economic values.”
WAVES and the Gaborone Declaration show that natural capital accounting is gaining momentum as a means to incentivize more sustainable development. The international news media is beginning to take notice as well. The results of the Rio+20 conference will be a good opportunity to gauge just how far the idea has come and what the extent of its future application might be.
Sources: Conservation International, The Guardian, SciDev.Net, World Bank.
To avoid these values being hypothetical only, or worse, padding the wallets of a few select government officials, what if the value of these resources was granted to the citizens of each country using a property rights model?
Using the concept of property rights for water (borrowed from David Zetland), property rights for all of these natural ecosystem services were distributed among the residents of the home countries – so that each person had a right to a share of the natural resource base (set allocations would be less useful, since populations are growing so rapidly, but a share of the overall total could be possible). Then if these citizens wanted to lease these rights to, say, a large mineral extraction company, they could.
What other ideas are out there for both operationalizing the valuation of ecosystem services, as well as ensuring that these values reach those who inherit the consequences of mismanagement?
https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/ Schuyler Null
That's an interesting tension — who gets to make these determinations on resource use? I think there will always be conflict around land use and extraction if people don't (or can't) own their own land and the proceeds from it. But then again, if it were solely up to the individual, chances are you'd have a tough time convincing that person that their mango forest is worth $16,000 worth of flood insurance since that value is almost entirely long-term and probably realized somewhere else.
How do you square natural resource accounting then with individual rights, or does it depend on state control of resources?
http://twitter.com/watersecurity Patrick Keys
Excellent points. Thinking about these issues purely in terms of either individual or state control is probably not very productive. Those aren't the levels of control or governance on the ground. Many states have several layers of governance between the two – provincial, municipal, maybe even neighborhood/community level.
It seems like a good fit would be to match the scale of natural resource property rights with the scale of governance. In some cases individuals might be the best suited (though I doubt this is the case very often), I imagine that small community or county-level ownership might be better.
Checkout the Figure 4 on page 7 of this policy brief for a recent UNEP publication (http://goo.gl/izqxB). Temporal scales and spatial scales correspond to different scopes of government. For the mango forest flood insurance value ($16,000), that would need to happen at the forest spatial scale, since the flood insurance is a product of the forest itself.
Have you checked out InVEST at all? Its a software tool for examining valuation of ecosystem services, and I'm digging into it now; might be of interest…