A major UN report has found that the Earth's ongoing nature losses may soon begin to damage national economies. The third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3), warns that some ecosystems may soon reach "tipping points" where they rapidly become less useful to humanity.

These tipping points could include the rapid dieback of forest, algal takeover of watercourses and mass coral reef death. According to the UN, the global abundance of vertebrates fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006. Last month, scientists confirmed that governments would not meet their target of curbing biodiversity loss by 2010. Ahmed Djoglaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), says, "We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate never before seen in history - extinction rates may be up to 1,000 times higher than the historical background rate."

The relationship between nature loss and economic harm is much more than just figurative, the UN believes. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has already calculated the annual loss of forests at $2-5 trillion, dwarfing costs of the banking crisis. ICLEI is involved in a TEEB study for local and regional administrators (D2 report), which shows that local governments have taken up the fight to restore the balance, and have started to understand that to balance the true trade offs of their decisions, they must consider the value of ecosystem services.

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