Humans Inflicted 47 Trillion Worth Of Damage To The Environment From 1961 To 200

The findings are striking, says Srinivasan. The highest estimates suggest humans have wrought $47 trillion worth of damage to the environment over 4 decades. (For comparison, the global gross domestic product in 2007 is estimated at $65 trillion.) Most of the blame lies with high- and middle-income nations. These countries have emitted the majority of greenhouse gases, for example, yet poor nations suffer more from the effects of the emissions, such as increased weather disturbances and increased incidence of infectious disease. ... Economist Edward Barbier of the University of Wyoming, Laramie, says the effort is ambitious but unrealistic. He notes that there are simply not enough data to undertake this type of global analysis. "It's a step backward from serious attempts to bring economists and ecologists to tackle complex environmental problems, including valuing ecosystem services," he says. However, Daniel Cole, a political theorist at Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis, says this study shows how far ecological economics has come in the past few decades. "The only thing worse than error-prone efforts to assign values to nonmarket goods may be not to make such efforts," he says. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/122/2

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