Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
What’s nature worth? Financial crunch may bring rethink
Would you pay $1,000 a year for a remote patch of mangrove swamp?
Maybe not — but more and more environmental economists are arguing that you should.
And they say that the worst financial crisis in 80 years could be a good opportunity to overhaul the world’s economic system and put a price tag on what are often viewed as “free” services from nature, ranging from coral reefs’ role as nurseries for fish, to wetlands’ ability to purify water. See the story here.
Markets failed to regulate banks in the current crunch and they are doing even less to slow global warming that the U.N. Climate Panel projects will bring far bigger economic problems — more droughts, floods, heatwaves that disrupt food and water supplies and rising seas that could swamp low-lying coasts from Bangladesh to Florida. 
In a 2006 report into the costs of global warming, former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said: “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.”
Refugees in Antarctica? Olympics in cyberspace?
Antarctica’s population is rising because of climate refugees.
The European Union agrees to let Morocco join in return for exclusive rights to solar power from its part of the Sahara desert.
The Olympics are held only in cyberspace because it costs too much for athletes to travel around the world.
