Business-speak in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

In the best tradition of Anglo-Saxon journalism, this article on CommonDreams.org about the newly released environmental report does not tell you what the report is called until the 5th paragraph, or who issued it until the 8th paragraph.

Anyway, the report is interesting because of what is says and how. The top-level summary (Statement of the Board) includes:

These [human] changes [to ecosystems] have helped to improve the lives of billions, but at the same time they weakened nature’s ability to deliver other key services such as purification of air and water, protection from disasters, and the provision of medicines.

I beg you pardon? Nature itself is now in the business of delivering services? Is that how far our everything-is-business and human-beings-are-consumers mentality has gone? More of the same:

Among the outstanding problems identified by this assessment are ...; the intense vulnerability of the 2 billion people living in dry regions to the loss of ecosystem services, including water supply; ...

And

The loss of services derived from ecosystems is a significant barrier to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty, hunger, and disease.

This almost sounds like ecosystems have let us down by defaulting on their provision of services.

Then come the following common-sense conclusions which, sadly, sound radical in our current unbridled capitalist mentality:

The pressures on ecosystems will increase globally in coming decades unless human attitudes and actions change.
Measures to conserve natural resources are more likely to succeed if local communities are given ownership of them, share the benefits, and are involved in decisions.

Then comes what can be construed (by me at least) as a critique of standard economics:

Even today’s technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems. They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.

See this article for a critique of how standard economics perceives natural resources as limitless, sometimes with the argument that, as resources get exhausted, their price will rise until it is high enough to make newsources economical. The assumption, of course, is that resources are indeed unlimited, and it is just a matter of the rising cost of exploiting them. This is nonsense.

Then comes more troublesome language, talking about "natural assets" and "the productivity of ecosistems":

Better protection of natural assets will require coordinated efforts across all sections of governments, businesses, and international institutions. The productivity of ecosystems depends on policy choices on investment, trade, subsidy, taxation, and regulation, among others.