Report to the President – Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy, Executive Office of the President – Presidents Council of Advisors, on Science and Technology, July 2011.
“The central messages of this report are two. First, the economic and environmental dimensions of societal well-being are both indispensable, as well as tightly intertwined. Second, even as the government is rightly focused on the direct threats to the economic aspects of well-being in the form of recession, unemployment, and the stagnation of the standard of living of the middle class, it must not fail to address the threats to both the environmental and the economic aspects of well-being that derive from the accelerating degradation of the environmental capitalthe Nations ecosystems and the biodiversity they containfrom which flow ecosystem services underpinning much economic activity as well as public health, safety, and environmental quality..The largest part of the new report is focused on solutionswhy government has an essential role to play in the stewardship of environmental capital, what approaches are most promising for doing so both alone and in concert with the private sector, and what specific measures this Administration could embrace to most cost-effectively improve both the governments and the private sectors performance in protecting these crucial assets. The recommended measures include ways to better integrate and utilize existing data and models across the relevant Federal agencies, as well as to fill gaps in the data and improve the models over time; increased agency use of advances in the valuation of environmental capital and ecosystem services in planning and management decisions; targeting Federal conservation investments to achieve greater benefits at the same or lower costs; and employing the increasingly sophisticated tools of eco-informatics to improve public and private decision-making about the management of environmental capital.”
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