Bhutan S Forests Worth More Than Nu 700 Billion a Year

Press release: 10 February, 2012. Prime Minister’s Office. Thimphu. Bhutan Bhutan’s Forests Worth More than Nu 700 billion a Year

 Bhutan’s ecosystem services are many times more valuable than GDP

 Nature is by far Bhutan’s largest (free) export, with 53% of Bhutan’s ecosystem services benefitting people outside the country

 Bhutan will be first national government to fully support counting the value of natural, social, cultural, human wealth

The first preliminary economic valuation of Bhutan’s rich natural wealth, based on existing statistics, reveals that nature’s services are worth far more than we human beings produce. In fact, more than half the value of Bhutan’s forests and rivers goes to people outside Bhutan who derive huge benefit from the services nature performs here in regulating the climate, storing carbon, preventing floods, and protecting downstream water supplies.

Until now that extraordinary value has been invisible in our National Accounts that ― like GDP (Gross Domestic Product)-based accounting systems around the world ― only count what the market economy produces, and which ignore our natural, social, cultural, and human wealth.

But that’s all about to change. As Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley said today, releasing the dramatic new numbers:

“Bhutan will be the first country in the world to create comprehensive GNH Accounts that properly value our precious natural, social, cultural, and human resources, and the costs of their depreciation, along with the built capital that is presently counted.

Such full-cost accounts are the necessary foundation of a genuine wellbeing and sustainability-based economic system, and will assess the true benefits and costs of economic activity. Bhutan’s new accounts will go far beyond GDP, just as recommended by the European Union, OECD, Stiglitz Commission, and many others, but as no country has yet done.”

Along with the numbers on the value of nature’s services, and to demonstrate how the new accounts work, Lyonchhen also released new numbers on Bhutan’s social values and human costs that are also ignored in GDP-based measures:  Bhutanese citizens freely serving their religious institutions, cleaning up litter, helping youth with drug problems, volunteering in schools and basic health units, helping sick and elderly neighbours and more, provide Nu 320.5 million a year in voluntary services. That’s what it would cost to replace those free services for pay. “That caring generosity and voluntarism is what GNH is all about,” said Lyonchhen.

 And alcoholism costs the country more than Nu 30 million a year in health care costs alone. And that does not include the cost of the road deaths and injuries due to alcohol, estimated by Royal Bhutan police to amount to about a quarter of all road accidents in the country, nor the costs of crime, family violence, productivity losses and other alcohol costs.

The value of Bhutan’s ecosystem services was studied in the last year by Dr. Ida Kubiszewski and Dr. Robert Costanza of Portland State University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, who are in the country now to help the Royal Government prepare for its 2nd April meeting at the United Nations that will launch a new global economic paradigm.

Dr. Costanza is a co-founder of the field of ecological economics and a world-renowned expert who made international headlines as the first ever to estimate the economic value of the world’s ecosystem services. Also participating in the press conference today were Dr. Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, and Dr. Joshua Farley of the University of Vermont.

Results released today show that Bhutan’s natural wealth provides Nu 760 billion a year in ecosystem services, of which forests alone provide 93.8%, with the remainder attributable to the services provided by rivers, lakes, cropland, and wetlands. Of the total value, 53% of the benefits go to people outside Bhutan, and 47% (or Nu 511,000 for every Bhutanese citizen) go to our own people in clean air, water, healthy soils, recreation and other values. Field studies will follow, undertaken by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests, to refine these preliminary estimates.

 The full print report on the value of Bhutan’s ecosystem services is attached

 The full 96-page report on the value of voluntary work in Bhutan and the full 210-page prospectus for Bhutan’s proposed new National Accounts are on the attached CD  The full report on Cost of Alcohol in Bhutan will be released next month.

 This package also contains a statement by Lyonchhen Jigmi Y. Thinley on the new National Accounts, and summary overviews of all four reports:

 The prospectus of Bhutan’s proposed new National Accounts

 The economic value of Bhutan’s ecosystem services

 The economic value of voluntary work in Bhutan

 The cost of alcohol in Bhutan