The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Capitalism creates incentives for environmental preservations
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Capitalism creates incentives for environmental preservations.White 20 (Jane Gleeson-White, is an adjunct lecturer at UNSW Canberra and author, 2020-04-28, “Six Capitals Updated Edition”, Allen & Unwin publisher, ProQuest Ebook Central - Detail page (umich.edu), ) - EM In 2010, the World Bank launched its own initiative to develop natural capital accounting. Called Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES), it was designed to promote sustainable development by encouraging natural capital accounting, and to help develop ecosystem accounts, in the belief that they would ensure that both development planning and governments consider natural resources. By 2013, eight countries— Costa Rica, Botswana, Colombia, Madagascar, the Philippines, Guatemala, Indonesia and Rwanda— had signed up to WAVES and were developing natural capital accounts for resources like forests, water and minerals. Since then, Zambia, Uganda, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Vietnam have joined the program. At the national level, natural capital accounting has spawned its own world of complex environmental– economic transactions. Among them is a system called ‘payments for ecosystem (or environmental) services’ (PES), a broad term for a wide range of economic arrangements that attempt to assign a price to ecosystem or environmental services in order to conserve them. PES was devised to offer landowners incentives to manage their land to provide an environmental service, such as maintaining forest cover. The longest-running ecosystem services scheme is the Conservation Reserve Program in the United States, which dates to the 1950s. Under this scheme, the US government pays out over US$1.5 billion a year to landowners to encourage them to protect endangered wildlife habitats and environmentally sensitive land. Like so many of these initiatives designed to account for nature, it appears to work in nature’s favor, as does the experience of Costa Rica (which I discuss below). Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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