PRODUCERS' BLOG

Since I started specialising in making environmental films in the early 1980s, the ‘job’ seemed more about convincing viewers about the dire over-the-horizon threats to our welfare and economy than straightforward reportage. Except for a few diehards, that’s no longer the case. The UNEP Executive Director tells Nature Inc. that the green economy is underway.

The ‘how’ has overtaken the ‘why’.

As we report in ‘Union of Green’ governments are investing billions in the green economy. And as we have found out in our sister series on BBC World News, World Challenge, there are thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs who seek profit by working within nature’s boundaries and, moreover, boasting of being socially-responsible as a way to increase sales. Both World Challenge and Nature Inc. demonstrate that initiative and ideas are not lacking.

What is lacking is an enabling environment that properly rewards the husbanding of our embattled ecosystems. On the whole, a free market does not have any convenient way of fixing a true price on the ecological services we feature in the series – wetlands, native species, watersheds, climate stability, pollinators and pest predators – even nature’s tried and trusted evolutionary design.

Squandering a renewable resource such as supplies of clean water or a native forest, is what the economists call an ‘externality’. A fancy way of saying it is not us, but a new generation who are likely to pay the price in the form of lost resources.

Our editorial policy is predicated on T.S. Eliot’s observation that humans can only take so much bad news. So we go out of our way to find ‘scaled-up’ cases where these costs are internalised. However, our obligation is to report the facts, properly sourced and so the recurrent theme of Nature Inc. is a failure to fix a price on wastage that our assessments of GNP cannot measure: at least in a form that works its way into effective policy.

According to the The Economics of Biodiversity assessment (TEEB), we are wasting over US$ 4 trillion worth of environmental services every year – where is the coverage of that in the geyser of media attention given to the recession? The scientific evidence is overwhelming that we are asset stripping the planet. But it is not showing up sufficiently on the radar of public concern to make us change our ways and to force governments to take the lead in giving environmentally-tempered development real traction. No wonder the TEEB study leader, a former top banker, describes this as the “real credit crisis.”

In ‘Natural Prevention’ we report on how the wrecking of the protective wetlands of Louisiana had left New Orleans so exposed to Katrina. There were warnings a-plenty, of course, from ecologists, but they went unheeded. For me, nothing puts this in starker perspective for a viewer than Nature Inc.’s comparison with the two Caribbean islands of Cuba and Haiti – in the former which took the policy of safeguarding coastal forest and mangrove as part and parcel of policy of disaster preparedness, a few individuals perished whereas in Haiti thousands died and – perhaps more importantly – were robbed of topsoil, the basic means of recovery for all poor villagers.

At the root of it all is governance. Without the ‘good’ variety you can’t have much in the way of sustainable development.

The great and abiding problem with that over-worked and ill-understood term, ‘sustainable development’ is that for the billion or so absolute poor such as the Haitian farmer, it doesn’t seem to deliver survival. And in the commercial realm, it often doesn’t deliver the buck for the short term most industries and businesses operate under.

There’s lots of profit to be made from carpet-bagging renewable resources, especially in corrupt environments where graft can pay handsomely. (I discovered this a long time ago when I returned in the 1990s to what just over ten years before, had been a thickly forested area on a S.E. Asian island to find its hardwoods had been completely liquidated and the profits invested – in the case of one illegal feller, I was told – into a BMW concession: highly sustainable for him!)

In Nature Inc. we have taken no satisfaction from anticipating what were to become – for the environment – ‘big’ stories in 2009. The honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (which led our very first programme) has sent alarm bells ringing on just how frighteningly quickly nature – with its intimate and still poorly-understood connections – can bite back. As now an oft-quoted Einstein once said, mankind has about 4 years if the bees disappear.

I am writing this blog on a farm in New England. A mysterious fungus is spreading rampantly and threatens the survival of insect-eating bats (the beneficent role of bats were also featured in the first series of Nature Inc.). The US Congress is debating what to do: if the fungus spreads to the rest of the country – and even the whole continent – the billions of dollars in services the bats provide in consuming insect pests of staple crops could be lost.

And since North and South America account for much of world food surpluses, what does that mean for the gobal food supply? Radically reduced populations of the pollinators and pest predators taken with other serious trends (such as ocean acidification and the irreplaceable water-supplying role of the Amazon to the food baskets of southern Latin America identified in Nature Inc.) could do much more to unhinge the global economy and political stability (remember the food riots of 2007?) than anything else.

On the ‘plus’ side we have new winds blowing from the White House and leaders such as Chancellor Merkel sounding as green as green can be. And a small country like Norway divvy-ing up several hundreds of millions to save the rainforest.

The next big test will come from the Copenhagen COP in December – and our final programme in the series – ‘Now and Forever’ takes a lead from the Stern thesis that the only rational course is to invest now in anti global warming measures to save up to 4% of global expenditures by mid century.

Pre Copenhagen, Western nations and Japan are looking for complementary commitments from the other G20 countries. For there is a new order emerging from the economic recession with the relatively unscathed Brazils, Chinas and Indias (all countries featured prominently in the current series) increasingly calling the shots. Their demand for resources to pursue destructive Western patterns of development is one reason why despite patches of good news, the rate of extinction and the unravelling of the web of life, in general, are gathering pace.

As with so many things, Mahatma Gandhi got it right when he was asked if a newly independent India should be like Great Britain: “If it took half the resources of the world to make England so rich, how many worlds would India need?”

A quarter of century after reading Gandhi’s observation, I still think this one of the most succinct statements about our finite world. Are we coming round to the same point of view?

To mix three metaphors: are the stories we feature in Nature Inc (and World Challenge), straws in the wind? Or green shoots with deceptively deep roots? The Jury is still out.

The editor of Nature Inc. kicks off the producer’s blog for Season Two.

The lens are being dusted off. The Lonely Planet guides are coming out. Experts are being consulted. Treatments written. Locations scouted.

I.E. the Nature Inc. crews are getting ready to film the second instalment of the series that puts a price tag on ecosystem services.

The last series in 2008 went down pretty well with BBC World News viewers – certainly well enough for us to come back again with six new TV half hours. It’s been a bit of a struggle to get the cash together, but we have reached our target – I hope.

We haven’t been idle since the last series went out. We have been tracking developments in the world of eco-economics, and have been pleased to see that the consensus is growing that nature does have a dollar and cents value.

There is still plenty of scepticism about the rigour of the economics, but in the face of overwhelming evidence that abusing nature costs us dear, this is an idea whose time has arrived.

At the IUCN General Assembly we filmed the IUCN Director-General’s debate on the financial value of ecosystem services which can be seen on our website here.

In February we filmed expert discussions on the content of UNEP’s ’Green Jobs: Towards decent work in a sustainable, low-carbon world’ report. We’ll hopefully have these posted on the website soon. We also made a 6 Minute opener for the UNEP Governing Council on the New Green Deal (see here ) on this website.

Out of these developments we have devised six possible programmes for transmission on the BBC in June and July 2009. We are currently consulting our informal advisory board on this content:

· Natural Prevention – Looks at the crucial role costal ecosystems play in reducing the costs of natural disasters around the world. Protecting these hotspots could help save literally billions of dollars every year.

· Biomimicry – A new kind of entrepreneur is taking advantage of the lessons nature has to teach the business world. These innovations inspired by nature could be lost forever if we don’t protect our biodiversity now.

· Spud-U-Like – How the humble potato is becoming the world’s most important crop and why – from Yunnan to Kenya – this is good news for nature and our shopping baskets.

· Standing Profits –From the Bolivia to the Veldt new initiatives suggest more money can be made from leaving forests standing than by destroying them. But will this innovative market in forest carbon credits really help our threatened woodlands?

· Green Jobs – The business world is beginning to prepare itself to meet future environmental challenges. We take a look at the jobs being created in these rapidly expanding green industries to see what they offer the workers – and the planet.

· The Politics Of Green – Around the world politicians are waking up to the emerging realities of green markets. But how will they promote their environmentally friendly policies to a sceptical electorate?

I have started to assign the production crews for each story and will be asking them to ‘blog for biodiversity’ on this site.

So keep watching this space.

Robert Lamb

Editor of Nature Inc.

If you get a chance make sure you get a chance to check out Janine Benyus and her talk about the huge store of ideas in nature that could revolutionise the way we produce goods. This is exactly the kind of thing we are looking for for the Nature Inc series. It really is amazing the possibilities for future technology that Benyus outlines – particularly exciting, I think, is a the potential for carbon free manufacturing by utilising ‘self-assembly’ methods prevalent at all levels of nature.

Barcelona was very much a success in relation to getting a full perspective on the important issues involved in the ideas we were looking at. For me it was also a strange experience; my late father once worked for IUCN and it was very weird to be meeting some of the people who once worked with him before I was born. He wrote a book called “A World Without Trees” at the beginning of the 80s which used the destruction of European forests to Dutch Elm Disease as a metaphor for the wider industrialisation of forestry and destruction of global woodlands. It has been a bizarre process reading his words back whilst researching the new REDD initiatives.

It is a very important time to be looking more deeply at REDD – something that has both the possibility to make a real difference to the global environment but also holds the prospect of accelerating its destruction. Paying communities to halt deforestation and manage their forests sustainably, whilst integrating the offsets generated by this into the global carbon trading market, could really help forests pay for themselves and safeguard their future. But if REDD ends up simply further institutionalising Western economism and the commoditisation of nature, marginalising local communities and businesses, then it will not only have negative effects on the environment but also further degrade cultural diversity and deepen poverty around the world.

Glenn Prickett, executive director of Conservation International, kindly stopped off for a brief interview with us about REDD. He had said earlier in the day that it felt like he had been in preparation for the growth of this issue for the last 20 years and it was like the starter’s gun had just gone off. It has indeed been surprising how quickly and fully people have come to back the initiative. What is important now is how the international community moulds this growing market in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the old capitalist system whilst ushering in a new model for valuing natural assets.

We are sifting through possible places to film and how to fund these programmes as I write this very blog. Watch this space for more insights into our work on the REDD issue and please feel free to send us any links or any of your ideas about how we can put the episode together.

One Planet Pictures went to Barcelona at the beginning of the month to follow the IUCN World Conservation Congress. Robert was moderating two events, one of which I was helping to film, and we also used the opportunity to research more ideas for the next series of Nature Inc.

This year was the first year that the private sector was welcomed into the IUCN fold, reflecting a wider move within the conservation movement to integrate with the market in an attempt to situate itself within mainstream policy discourse. Such a context obviously proved a very fertile environment for looking into topics about the economic value of nature.

We came away with lots of information on the rapidly ballooning area of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), as well as good leads on episodes about sustainable tourism, Biotrade and Biomimicry. At the moment we’re following these leads and the next series is shaping up nicely.

I think it is important for the shows to have a really positive spin – there is indeed a lot to be worried about out there but these new developments do offer real hope that the global system could change for the better. I can often be incredibly cynical about the capitalist market but I think that these initiatives are significant because, to work properly, they necessitate transformations within the market itself.

So all in all the Congress went very well for Nature Inc. Watch this space because soon we’ll be putting up some of the footage we shot when recording ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ talk that Robert moderated. This theoretical work underscores much of what we try to show in the series.