I hope I'm not stepping on someone's diary, but I searched the site just now for any news of the World Bank's announcement this morning that new accounting rules will be(gradually) put in place to (re) evaulate a nation's GDP. In the future, nations may have to place the cost of environmental destruction on their books.
Robert Zoellick, president of the WB, described a situation ripe for accounting on NPR this morning when he (paraphrasing here) said, " ... for example, a developer may want to fill in wetlands, but there is a social cost to private industry. The area will lose the protection that wetlands provide from storms, from hatcheries for fish .... et al."
The Guardian does a good job of describing what's happened at the U.N. Biodiversity Confernce in Nagoya this week, from whence the World Bank's announcement issued.
Bypassing for a brief moment the idea that nature can be quantified, this idea will, if implemented, set on its head the decades long complaint many of us have had regarding calculating the GDP.
continued at Daily Kos....
