Jim Witkin
Source: The New York Times
June 18, 2010

A well-worn management mantra observes, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." A United Nations research effort known as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, or TEEB, suggests that this maxim can also be applied to the earth's ecosystems—habitats like forests, oceans and tropical mangroves.

For example, each year, roughly 30 million acres of forest worldwide are cut down, a combined area that is roughly the size of Greece, according to Pavan Sukhdev, the group's study leader and a former senior banker at Deutsche Bank. While the forest products that the cutting yields provide some short-term gain, in the long term we lose "services" provided by the forest like carbon dioxide storage, clean air, protection from floods and soil erosion, food and natural medicines.

The problem, Mr. Sukhdev asserts, is that we have failed to put a price on those services and analyze the markets for them. If people first measure their economic value, his group argues, policies can be adopted that allow for better management of those ecosystem services, like creating markets where the use and the supply of the services can be traded.

To read the full text of the article, click here.