Benn to call on world leaders to adopt biodiversity pricing

World leaders must find a way to price the impact of their decisions on biodiversity in the same way that the international community is finding a way of pricing carbon, the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, said today.

Benn was setting out some of the Labour election manifesto thinking before a speech tomorrow in which he will warn that the world may be going through its sixth great extinction event – when many species decrease sharply. But he will warn against pessimism over the failure of the Copenhagen talks, saying a way has to be found to reverse “the collective loss of personal, economic and environmental optimism”.

He said he believed one way to repel the attack on biodiversity was to repeat the success of the report into the economic consequences of climate change produced for the Treasury by Lord Stern in 2006. Britain is part-funding a report being prepared for the European commission by the Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev into the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity. It is due to report to the UN conference on biodiversity at the end of the year in Japan.

Benn said: “We have got the Climate Change Act that means for the first time the carbon consequences of the decisions we make have to be taken into account by government, and so the next thing is to do that in the same way with the natural world. The report prepared by Sukhdev can do for our understanding of the natural world what Nick Stern did for the understanding of the economic impact of climate change.”

The Stern report led to the Climate Change Act, which requires the government to publish carbon budgets setting out how it will cut emissions. One consequence is that “dirty products” become more expensive for the consumer.

Asked how nature could be priced, and biodiversity targets set, Benn said: “We will need to think about the most effective mechanism for taking account of the economic impact of decisions we make in relation to biodiversity.”

He said: “This is a century in which we will recognise that living within your means can no longer just be about money, but also must be about first living within your carbon means and second living within the natural world’s ability to support humankind over issues like fishing and deforestation.”

He cited the example of Panama canal shipowners paying for reforestation either side of the canal on the basis that insurance premiums were rising due to limited water supplies, or the need to preserve trees with medicinal anti-malaria properties or the cost of not saving bees in the UK and the loss of pollination of flowers.

He added: “We need to have a biodiversity equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One of the reasons we have made big progress on climate change is because we had a respected scientific body saying ‘this is what is going on’. We need the same for biodiversity.

“Stern made people sit up and take notice. Stern said ‘this is the cost of dealing with climate change and this is the cost of not dealing with it. Stern brought this issue to the attention of business people and economists. We have to realise we live in a world where we can no longer take without consequence”.

In his speech tomorrow to centre-left group Progress he will warn that “the world is going through the planet’s resources quicker than they can be renewed. In Europe it is three times faster. With huge population growth, at this rate we will need three planets by 2050. The problem of course is that we have just one.”

He will warn that “biodiversity is being wiped out with species becoming extinct at one thousand times the normal rate.

“Our planet may be going through its sixth great extinction event, but you would not know it to read today’s headlines.”

He will call for greater optimism over the ability of man to improve its environment.

He also said that David Cameron appears not to have convinced his own party of the importance of the environment, pointing out that a recent Conservative survey of 141 prospective Tory candidates put climate change bottom of issues that concerns them.