Presidential Report Calls for Improved Accounting of Ecosystem Services and Greater Protection of Environmental Capital
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an independent council of the Nation's leading scientists and engineers, has released a report entitled Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy.
The report released today updates a 1998 report that called for greater understanding of and investment in America’s “living capital.” The new report notes that the intervening 13 years have brought a deeper understanding of the trends that are degrading U.S. environmental capital, including replacement of complex natural ecosystems with simpler and less stable man-made ones, overexploitation of resources, increased chemical pollution, expanded ranges of invasive species, and—amplifying the impacts of all of these—global climate change.
The report notes that a tremendous amount of economic activity is underpinned by the Nation's ecosystems and the biodiversity they contain, and that the Federal government - as part of its larger responsibility to strengthen the economy and improve Americans' quality of life - has an important role to play in the stewardship of this environmental capital.
It also concludes, however, that the Nation lacks a careful accounting of the services provided by ecosystems and the condition of many environments that support these ecosystems.
More information about the report, and a link to download a copy, is available on the PCAST website
http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast/docsreports
Posted by Anne Wallach Thomas on Tuesday, November 1, 201111:45PM
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