Humanity must stop considering nature as a source of short-term profit and base itself on “values” linking its well-being to the state of our planet, warns the UN in a report published Monday.
Without such a change, the goals of sustainable development and reducing global inequalities will remain wishful thinking, underline UN biodiversity experts IPBES in the volume devoted to “values and valuation of nature”. .
“The way we approach economic development is at the heart of the biodiversity crisis”, summarizes for AFP Unai Pascual, environmental economist at the University of Bern and co-chair of the IPBES session which adopted this report at a meeting of 139 countries in Bonn.
The text “aims to integrate different types of values into decisions”, continues the expert.
It comes three days after another IPBES report warning that the overexploitation of wild species threatens the well-being of billions of human beings.
These two reports will feed into the discussions at the COP15 biodiversity, in December in Montreal, which must set a framework for protecting nature and its resources at the global level by 2050.
For this second opus, 80 experts analyzed more than 13,000 scientific studies on the destruction of ecosystems and its reasons and the alternative values that could promote their sustainability.
Because Man is the main cause of this crisis of life, which is closely intertwined with climate change.
Source of life
Since 1950, average life expectancy has almost doubled, while per capita wealth (in the sense of GDP) has increased fivefold.
“Nature is what allows us to live,” noted the boss of the UN environment program, Inger Andersen. “It provides us with food, care, raw materials, oxygen, climate regulation and much more. »
But the Earth has physical constraints and, according to scientists, at least six of the nine “planetary boundaries” have already been exceeded. These are thresholds that humanity should not exceed to preserve the favorable conditions in which it was able to develop.
Two previous UN reports, on climate change in 2019 and biodiversity in 2019, had already concluded that only an in-depth transformation of the way we produce, distribute and consume could help redress the bar.
An almost impossible task if humanity does not change the way it sees and assesses nature, warn IPBES experts. Because the majority perception still remains that sustainability can only be achieved at the expense of human well-being, whereas the good future state of our societies requires a healthy nature, capable of regenerating itself.
Living “of”, “with”, “in” and “like” nature
The report classifies into four main categories, which can be combined, human “values” in relation to nature, which can be summed up as living “from”, “with”, “in” and “like” its environment.
Humans live “from” nature if they focus on the exploitation of resources to fuel their growth and lifestyle. This is the dominant view, which has recently led some to want to put a price on the “services provided” by ecosystems (CO2 sequestered by forests for example).
Living “with” nature means seeing it as independent of human needs. The stated objective of placing under the status of protected areas 30% of the surface of the globe notably falls into this category, while joining the first in that it makes it possible, for example, to maintain fish stocks thanks to non-fishing zones.
For societies, particularly indigenous ones, who live “in” nature, the environment is part of their identity and their culture, a union pushed even further for those who live “like” nature.
Major projects, particularly infrastructure projects such as the Great Renaissance Dam that Ethiopia built on the Blue Nile or the “Maya Train” project in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, should in particular be decided taking into account all these “values,” not just the costs/benefits, according to the report.
The future text under negotiation for the Montreal conference could in this respect “change things”, hope members of the IPBES, many of whom are part of both bodies.
“We believe that this study on values can help the negotiations, politically speaking,” said Unai Pascual. “But there is the disturbing feeling that it will not be easy at all,” he acknowledges, while many differences remain according to the negotiators.