Ecosystem Assessment

The UN has come out with its Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, which outlines the challenges facing the protection of ecological services over the next 50 years. A lot of the same things we've heard before, but there are some very positive (and surprising!) admissions of the positive role that market-based mechanisms can play in achieving environmental goals, as well as the value of free-trade:

"Actions that focus on improving the lives of the poor by reducing barriers to international flows of goods, services, and capital tend to lead to the most improvement in health and social relations for the currently most disadvantaged people. But human vulnerability to ecological surprises is high. Globally integrated approaches that focus on technology and property rights for ecosystem services generally improve human well-being in terms of health, security, social relations, and material needs."

Great to hear - we need more people rejecting the status-quo environmentalism of a return to some kind of pre-industrial society and more people actually trying to find real solutions to ecological problems facing the planet.