ABSTRACT
Pavan Sukhdev proposes a range of answers to address the economic invisibility of nature's value. First, he advocates the 'greening' of national gross domestic product (GDP) accounts, and his Green India States Trust (GIST) project did exactly this for India. It calculated, for example, that the losses to just the nation's forest ecosystem services, such as erosion and flood prevention, over the period 2001–2003 amounted to a loss of 1.1 per cent of national GDP, with up to 6 per cent loss in some regions. Second, Sukhdev proposes that part of the solution for capturing nature's economic value is through designing market-based instruments with incentives and price signals. Although Sukhdev proposes government regulation and community-based solutions for managing many environmental problems, insofar as we are examining his arguments as representative of an approach to environmental problems that centrally involves monetary valuation techniques and the creation of new markets.
