Environmental News
Biodiversity hotspots in the tropics contribute to the "gross natural product" of goods and services resulting from biodiversity, which, at $33 trillion per year, exceeds the world's aggregate gross national product of $28 trillion, according to Oxford University researchers.
what nature already supplies," said Gary Meffe, editor of Conservation Biology at the University of Florida-Gainesville. A team of economists and ecologists recently estimated the value of goods and services from biodiversity at $33 trillion per year, compared with a global gross national product of $28 trillion, said Norm a n Meyers, a conservation biologist at Oxford University.
But the current economic system, which privatizes profits from use of natural resources but makes society pay the cost of environmental cleanup and restoration, does not recognize the value and has driven much of the extinction crisis, according to Michael Bean, director of the Wildlife Program for Environmental Defense, an environmental organization. "Loss of biodiversity
is the result of a lack of clear economic incentives to conserve biodiversity," he said. Providing new market-based mechanisms, such as ecotourism, to conserve biodiversity is expected to be a top priority at this month's Convention on Biodiversity meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, said Hans Verolme, project director of Bionet, a nonprofit organization. —JANET PELLEY
Internet tool reaches beyond politics to address climate change In hopes of spurring more businesses to address climate change, the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), a nonprofit alliance of large businesses concerned about environmental issues, unveiled in March a Webbased tool to help companies evaluate their sources of greenhouse gas emissions. GEMI created the tool "regardless of science and policy" because of the worldwide significance of climate change, said Richard Guimond, vice president of Environmental Health and Safety for semiconductor manufacturer Motorola, Inc., and chair of GEMI's Climate Change Work Group. "This is an issue that all
businesses must eventually come to grips with," Guimond added. The tool debuted the same week that General Motors Corp. became the third major auto company to defect from the Global Climate Commission, a nonprofit organization that opposes the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. For environmental organizations, the new tool "is another really promising signal that the debate on climate change has shifted—businesses are no longer talking about whether or not we should act, but how we should act," said Elizabeth Cook, codirector of the nonprofit World Resource Institute's Management
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Institute for Environmental and Business, an organization that provided input for the tool's creation. The advice proffered by the interactive tool, which resides on the Web at www.businessandclimate. org, might appear fairly elementary to some observers. For example, the site's self-assessment survey asks users whether they use powerful greenhouse gases like perfluorocarbons (PFCs) or sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). Any company that uses those compounds is probably very aware of their climate change impact; after all U.S. semiconductor companies set a goal more than four years ago of reducing its PFC
emissions by 10% from 1995 levels by 2005. But only a dozen companies have completed corporate-wide greenhouse gas inventories, attesting to the importance of providing such seemingly basic information, Cook said. None of the GEMI companies involved in the tool's rollout, including Motorola, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Occidental Petroleum Corp., and Eastman Kodak Co., had completed a corporate-wide inventory. Although the tool's ostensible purpose is to "help companies that don't have the resources of multinational companies," Guimond noted that it is also likely to be valuable for large companies. Many multinational organizations are cutting their environment, health, and safety (EHS) programs to reduce costs, Guimond said. EHS professionals are under pressure to show value,
agreed Jim Thomas, executive director of Health, Global warming potentials for different Safety, and Environment business conference options for pharmaceutical giant Novartis Corp. He conVideo-teleconferencing generates less than 1% of the greentended that the facts and house gases of air travel, according to research conducted figures found on the new by Kodak, a vendor of the equipment and a member of the GEMI Web site could help Global Environmental Management Initiative. EHS staffers justify their existence. The Web site includes information about products, processes, and procedures that GEMI's member companies have employed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, including energy conservation measures. Some of the products deSource: Eastman Kodak Co. scribed, such as GEMI member Kodak's video-teleThe tool is a work in progress, conferencing tool, may appear selfGuimond said, promising that it serving. But Cook stressed that will be updated and improved avoiding airline travel of based on feedback from users. the most important ways that WRI —KELLYN S. BETTS reduces its climate impact
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