ARTICLE | Value Water
Water makes us happy, let’s understand its true values!
A
n amount of around $US 15 trillion, about a trillion less than India’s and China’s GDP put together, is currently being spent globally in COVID-19 recovery. This figure is rising, and we are still unsure when we will recover completely from this pandemic. Covid is part of the larger climate crisis. As the economies struggle to recover from this unprecedented crisis to humanity, each penny spent on the recovery is essential and is an opportunity at our hands to align the investments to the Paris Climate Agreement goals and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is also an opportunity to mend our ways and approaches to development to not tamper with nature anymore. We all need to reorient ourselves so that we can love nature and cohesively co-exist with it. Current development models have made us grow at the cost of nature, and that is why these cannot be called sustainable models. While people like us have been asking for a change in the way we view the economy, the UN has recently recognised this thought process. A new UNEP report, ‘Making Peace with Nature’, says that the global economy has grown nearly fivefold over the last 50 years, primarily due to a tripling in the extraction of natural resources and energy that has fuelled growth in production and consumption. Realising the unsustainability of growth, the UN has just adapted a framework that includes nature’s contributions when measuring economic prosperity and human well-being. Adopted by the UN Statistical Commission, this new framework called the System of EnvironmentalEconomic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) marks a major step forward beyond the commonly used statistic of gross domestic product (GDP) that has dominated economic reporting since the end of World War II. It is stated that this measure would ensure that natural capital such as forests, wetlands and other ecosystems are recognised in economic reporting. The human race has already emerged as a
42 April 2021 | www.urbanupdate.in
