Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
fore, the possibility of targeting valuation for ecosystem services without appro-
priate incentive and policy instruments to allow investment in them would not
hold a potentially viable business model that can guarantee their preservation. This
is because the poor would not have the appropriate finance to invest in their de-
velopment.
Since it is a basic human right that everybody should have access to a healthy
environment and by extension the derived ecosystem services, it is imperative that
they should be preserved. This has already led to the introduction of incentive
programmes such as market-based schemes for the development and conservation
of the natural services offered by the environment. Such market-based schemes
could be appropriately encouraged as an avenue for the development and promo-
tion of ecosystem services. Notably, payment and trading schemes for ecosystem
services are emerging as world-wide small-scale solutions, where one can acquire
credits for activities such as sponsoring the development of carbon sequestration
sources or the restoration of ecosystem services providers (World Bank 2010;
Daily 2006). For instance the Kyoto Protocol establish role for carbon trading
scheme (Lauterbach, 2007), which protected existing forests are not accepted as
carbon sequestration source for credit but afforestation and reforestation projects.
This is because as already mention the uptake of plants reduces through their life-
span (Kasting 1998). Therefore, businesses can gain a new prospective for judging
their own environmental impact and estimating their consumption of ecosystem
services by investing in their preservation at a level that would upset the dangers.
12.6 Potential Markets for Ecosystem Services
Since examples of ecosystem service-related markets already exists (World Bank
2008; Hawken 1999) there is a foundation for widening and mainstreaming the
potential for businesses based on them. Credit can be given to developers of such
services to sell to individuals who create damage to the environment through their
developmental activities, or better still, to those whose activities meet a threshold
at which their treatment of the ecosystem services as a common good of low value
would be deemed detrimental to human welfare. Such a determination would in-
volve setting of standards of environmental protection, sustainable development
and equity, especially in relation to consumption of global and national 'public
goods' from ecosystem services. These types of business development have al-
ready been growing among ecosystem developers like landscape, biodiversity and
forest managers. Even some re-insurance companies are now creating risk policies
on assets that are critical to environmental damage such Muichre re-insurance
company (MunichRE 2010). They are developing proactive environmental poli-
cies, such as lobbying for increase in global climate change research and the de-
velopment of ecosystem services. This underscores the business risks and oppor-
tunities perceived by the insurance industries, especially if the pay-outs for
environmental disasters related to climate change become significant. Also, these
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