Business and Eco-System

All businesses – all economic activities – depend on ecosystem services. Thus it is in the interests of business in general and companies in particular to help maintain and enhance those services.

Market-based instruments can achieve some environmental objectives for less economic cost than conventional approaches.Not surprisingly, business wants to find market-based ways to do this, given that business understands market mechanisms and knows them to be an extremely powerful lever.

Until recently, environmental NGOs have tended to be suspicious of this approach, partly because they tended to be suspicious of both business and markets, but also for the very good reason that it is often the poorest, most marginalized people who depend most directly on ecosystems, their services and their biodiversity for food, drinking water, clothing and shelter. Such people are rarely well equipped to participate in new markets.

Yet as NGOs have developed a more sophisticated understanding of markets and business, and as companies have become more knowledgeable about ecosystem services and their users, the two have begun to cooperate on solutions. It helps that business is beginning to understand and agree with the environmentalists' argument that conserving ecosystems and sustaining the services they provide is a pre-requisite for prosperity. Now we need to bring governments to this realization.