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Jonathan Hughes, director of conservation at the Scottish Wildlife Trust, said that species were continuing to go extinct at an unprecedented rate. "The true value of nature has been invisible and has not been factored in," he added. He gave the example of the recent storm in the Philippines, where mangrove forests that would have helped to protect many of the islands have been cut down. "If sold for wood the value of mangrove is £1,000 per hectare. But if you factor in storm protection, the fact fish use them to breed in, the carbon they absorb - the mangroves are worth around £21,000 per hectare to the local communities," Mr Hughes explained. Such unrecognised benefits are sometimes referred to as "ecosystem services".
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond will be among those speaking at the World Forum on Natural Capital in Edinburgh. The forum, will be attended by senior business leaders and conservationists, is considering a new kind of economics, according to Alan McGill from accountancy firm Price Waterhouse Coopers.
"Chief executives used to roll their eyes at the subject matter, but when you get Paul Polman who's running Unilever standing up and saying that climate change is costing his business £250m a year, that's time to wake up, that's time to do something, that's time to innovate," he told BBC News. "We will see changes from top to toe in organisations. I believe the chief financial officer will disappear, and you will have the chief information officer. It's taken around 150 years for accountants and governments to agree how financially to measure performance. We're now in the process of doing the same for non-financial information, looking at the environment and understanding how to value it. It won't take us 150 years to do that, because we haven't got 150 years to do it."
However, The World Development Movement takes a very different view and describes it as "The Great Nature Sale".
Nick Dearden told BBC News: "I don't know many people who believe that the financial markets will be able to solve the environmental crisis. I would argue the very reverse, actually. What we need to do is remove finance from nature and indeed remove finance from many of the places it is in the world today, and think about nature as something that cannot have a price put on it, and that's why it needs to be held in common by all of us." [SOYMB emphasis]
Nor is natural capital a particularly new idea. This article in the Socialist Standard from 2007 exposes the inherent contradiction in the proposal. “If market forces essentially cause and create environmental damage by literally encouraging an irrational human impact, how can you realistically expect those self-same forces to solve it?... When confronted by barriers of environmental legislation which are designed to diminish the rate of expected profits and the accumulation of capital, the capitalists will do what they have always done in their search for short-term profits: finding or creating loopholes, moving the goalposts, corrupting officials, trying to bribe the local population with empty promises, or shifting the whole concern to an area or region where a more favourable reception is expected and profits maintained.”
This proposed solution would distort the calculation of the rate of profit which is the key economic indicator for capitalism. Mucking about with that under capitalism would cause all sorts of problems. Economists put a price on everything they can, including the environment. Anything that cannot be quantified in money terms is simply ‘externalised’ – excluded from the balance sheet.
But painting capitalism green is good PR, however, pricing something is not the same as valuing it.
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