by David Roberts for Grist
The statistics are staggering. According to a recent report by environmental
consultancy Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program report, if the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated.
The report tallies up the total “unpriced natural capital” consumed by the world’s top industrial sectors. “Natural capital” refers to ecological materials and services like clean water or a stable atmosphere; “unpriced” means that businesses don’t pay to consume them. The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).
The total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.
“That amounts to a global industrial system built on sleight of hand, “ writes Roberts, “As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.”
