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2.1
FRAMEWORK AND GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR THE POLICY RESPONSE
Why IS BIoDIvERSITy NEGLECTED
IN DECISIoN-MAKING?
Biodiversity policy is not a new field. In recent
decades, nearly all countries have adopted targets and rules
to conserve species and habitats and to protect the environment
against pollution and other damaging activities. Policies
and measures that have positively affected biodiversity
and ecosystem services can take a wide variety of
forms (see Box 2.1).
BOX 2.1: Examples of policies that have
provided biodiversity conservation benefits
• Growth of protected area systems in developed
and developing countries;
• Development of integrated water resource ma
nagement (e.g. EU Water framework Directive);
• Legal recognition of liability for environmental
damage (e.g. for oil spills);
• Incentives to reward biodiversity management
(e.g. payments for ecosystem services in
Costa Rica);
• Protection of critical habitats (e.g. through the
Natura 2000 network, EU habitats Directive);
• Market based instruments (e.g. green tax transfer
scheme between states in Brazil, wetland
mitigation banking in US);
• Regulations to stop or limit the release of pollutants
into rivers and groundwater systems,
improve air quality and reduce the emissions
of greenhouse gases (GhG) into the atmosphere.
Despite this progress, the scale of the global biodiversity
crisis (see Chapter 1) shows that current policies are
simply not enough to tackle the problem efficiently.
Some of the reasons are only too familiar to policy-makers,
such as lack of financial resources, lack of capacity, information
and/or expertise, overlapping mandates and weak enforcement.
But there are also more fundamental economic
obstacles in this policy field which we need to understand
to make meaningful progress.
A root cause of the systematic neglect of ecosystems
and biodiversity in economic and development policy is
their characterisation as a public and often global good:
• benefits take many forms and are widespread,
which makes it difficult to ‘capture’ value and ensure
that beneficiaries pay for them. for example, a forest
provides local benefits to local people (timber, food,
other products); the forest ecosystem mediates
water flows and provides regional climate stability; and
forests are globally important because they sustain
biodiversity and act as long-term carbon sinks;
• existing markets and market prices only capture
some ecosystem services (e.g. ecotourism, water
supply). More commonly, individuals and businesses can
use what biodiversity provides without having to pay for
it, and those providing the service often don’t get due
recompense;
• costs of conservation and restoration are paid
immediately, often at local level, yet many benefits
occur in the future. for example, creating a protected
area to save endangered species can cause short-term
losses to user groups, which may lead us to give little
or no weight to the possible long-term benefits (e.g.
discovery of medicinal traits in such species).
further factors include:
• uncertainty about potential future benefits is
matched by ignorance about the risks of inaction.
We know too little about why each species is important,
what its role in the food web is, what could happen if it
goes extinct and the ‘tipping points’ of different ecosystems.
Uncertainties lead policy makers to hesitate:
spending money on policies with clear returns seems
preferable to spending on policies with less assured
outcomes;
TEEB foR NATIoNAL AND INTERNATIoNAL PoLICy MAKERS - ChAPTER 2: PAGE 4