Green policies can have big economic spinoffs: U.N.

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - The credit crunch is distracting from a shift to green policies that have big but often overlooked economic benefits, the head of the U.N. Environment Programme said on Monday.

Achim Steiner called on governments to do more to set higher value on the natural world, ranging from wetlands that purify water to forest parks that store billions of tons of greenhouse gases in their vegetation.

"The credit crisis is a very real but regrettable distraction" from efforts to protect the planet from threats such as climate change, he told Reuters during an October 5-14 International Union for Conservation of Nature congress.

He said governments should push ahead with a shift to a greener economy, including in the energy sector to break dependence on fossil fuels that U.N. Climate Panel says are culprits for most global warming.

"An energy transition is occurring for many different reasons. We should not allow ourselves to be distracted," he said.

"You are not talking about niches, pilot projects any more," he said of green technologies such as solar or wind power. "There is real money flowing."

"Germany has more jobs in the clean technology sector than in the automotive sector. There are more people working worldwide in renewables than the oil and gas sector," he said.

"We also see opportunities arising, green jobs. This is investing in economic development and more benign growth," he said. Governments should ask themselves: "can you bring forward a technology pathway we are clearly going to go down by a decade?"

MEXICO SHINES

He said he recently visited Mexico, where annual exports of solar voltaic technology now totaled $2.3 billion.

And one study on Monday showed that 15 percent -- or 312 billion tons -- of greenhouse gases locked in vegetation and soils were within the world's parks. Plants soak up carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow.

"This is like the national savings bank. This is the best protected carbon storage we have," he said of carbon in parks. He said it illustrated that protected areas had value beyond traditional roles including as refuges for endangered species.

And he said that the environmental movement had to become "economically more literate."

U.N.-backed studies have estimated that intact natural systems are far more valuable than if converted to farmland or fish farms. A coral reef by a Caribbean beach resort, for instance, can be worth up to $10,000 per hectare per year as a tourist draw and as a nursery for fish.

Many economists dismiss such numbers as too speculative. But Steiner said it was "even less rational" that oil could cost $20 a barrel and a few years later $140 a barrel.  Continued...