Ameenah Gurib-Fakim: Nature provides humanity with $100 trillion in services every year

Nature provides humanity with services worth $100 trillion every year.

Report informs that former President of Mauritius Ameenah Gurib-Fakim said this at an event titled "Azerbaijan: The Pulse of Healthy Homes," held as part of the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13) in Baku.

"Nature does not need us. What we need to do is find our place in the ecosystem in which we live. This begins, first of all, with proper respect for the environment, proper respect for our biodiversity and learning to return to our traditional practices, whose magic I discovered while working on medicinal plants. There are many solutions in this area that we can use to reduce poverty and address the lack of access to healthcare.

Now, returning to the ecosystem, in the not-so-distant past we have seen the impact of nature and, of course, vector-borne diseases caused by climate change, whose effects are naturally increasing. Therefore, we must return, reconsider our approach to nature and make sure that we do not continue cutting the branch that holds us all together on this planet. Because, at the end of the day, biodiversity is the foundation of life on Earth.

The sooner we realize that everything we do affects our own livelihoods and our own future, I think we will begin to think not once, but twice, about how we treat nature. If we were to put a monetary value on what nature gives us every year, nature provides us, free of charge, with goods and services worth $100 trillion every year - things we take for granted and happily destroy every day. These goods and services include clean water, clean air, food and everything else on which our lives depend. So let us return to the basics, to our roots. Let us return to the values instilled in us for generations and say that we will not dominate nature, but respect it," she said.