Human well-being is dependent upon "ecosystem services" provided by nature for free. Such services include water provision, air purification, fisheries, timber production and nutrient cycling to name a few. These are predominantly public goods with no markets and no prices, so their loss often is not detected by our current economic incentive system and can thus continues unabated. A variety of pressures resulting from population growth, changing diets, urbanisation, climate change and many other factors is causing biodiversity to decline. As a result, ecosystems are continuously being degraded. The world’s poor are most at risk from the continuing loss of biodiversity, as they are the ones that are most reliant on the ecosystem services that are being degraded.
The TEEB initiative was launched in response to a proposal by the G8+5 Environment Ministers (Potsdam, Germany 2007) to develop a global study on the economics of biodiversity loss. The Commission has been a strong supporter of TEEB from the start and one of the initiative's largest donors.
The TEEB study evaluates the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the associated decline in ecosystem services worldwide, and compares them with the costs of effective conservation and sustainable use. It intends to raise awareness of the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to facilitate the development of cost-effective policy responses and better informed decisions.