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One thing you realise about a rainforest is that it's never quiet unless the animals are scared.

The birds are talking, every animal is making noise unless it's hunting. There's a constant

hum __ chirping and noises and everything. It's just a beautiful, beautiful environment.

OK, but what's it worth?

What do ___ mean?

Like yeah the jungle's lovely, it's beautiful etc etc. Cash on the table what's the sound of the
______ worth to you?

Ten dollars? One hundred dollars?

Can we do a wee swap - so your lovely forest _____ for say the smell of wildflowers in a
meadow?

Ill consider it. But i'm raising this really because _______ this idea we could fight climate
change

by putting a price on the priceless.

This is The Climate Question ____ the BBC World Service with Kate Lamble and Jordan
Dunbar

asking, can putting a price on nature help?

At ___ end of the day price is what you pay at econ 101 and value is what you receive.

_____ Sukhdev is the chief executive of Gist - the Global Initiative for a Sustainable
Tomorrow.

The interesting _____ about nature is that actually the price of nature is zero because

most of what nature ________ us is free it's public goods and services.

Whereas actually its value is very high _______ what would you do if you didn't have

trees and oceans to absorb the pollution that ___ emit.

Pavan's company measures the impact of businesses on the environment right down to their
smallest and worst ____ workers.

Bees. I keep saying that bees provide pollination services

but when did a bee ever ____ you an invoice for pollination? But at the same time we can
estimate

as economists we ___ estimate the value of pollination based on good bee years and bad

bee years and that ______ is close to 200 billion dollars. That's huge. That's humongous.

But like our parents love we don't necessarily __________ the service provided.

Our generation is so mesmerised by the magic of markets that we think that ________ that
doesn't have a price doesn't

have a value.

Someone who owns a mangrove forest for example _____ make lots of money by cutting it
down and building a hotel.

Everyone else has to deal with the ____________ of the forest no longer protecting the land
from erosion,

no longer providing a home to animals and so __ and so on.

We end up in this sort of bizarre game of making private profits, public losses, _______
profits

public losses. You can't keep doing that it's like music the chairs the music will ____ at some
point.

Some people have come up with an idea to stop the game. Kevin Conrad grew __ in the

forest of Papua New Guinea where his parents were working as missionaries.

You know _ was blessed, I went to a one-room school and the teacher would put the
assignments up on the _____

and when you were done you could leave and so I figured out how to do __ assignments as
quickly

as possible so by about 09.30 or 10.00 I was out in the forest ___ that's when my real

education began right. I learned all about the plants and the animals ___ how they behaved
and

what was dangerous and where was safe and what you could eat ___ what you shouldnt'.
Kevin now runs a coalition of 60 developing countries looking to protect their ___________.

These resources are fragile. A small change in temperature or soil can trigger big
consequences

When _ was young the birds of paradise used to fly in all the high trees and when I go ____

to my village area I don't see the birds of paradise anymore and the reason is

those high tall trees have been cut as part of shifting agriculture, you know. Communities
will

cut the forest, burn them for the nitrates in the soil and then plant food for their families.

And the problem is as families get bigger those forests don't recover.

All of this of course ___ an impact on the climate. Growing trees naturally hoover up carbon
dioxide as part of photosynthesis

___ lock it away.

Globally forests actually absorb around a third of all of our emissions every year.

Gases ____ otherwise would be warming the planet.

So when you cut the trees down you get a double whammy. Not ____ are they no longer
around to suck up all those emissions

the trees can also rot or burn, releasing ___ the carbon they once stored.

The same is true of grasses on the savanna or kelp in the oceans. _____ they store carbon.

Dead they release it.

So how do we make the common ecological good trump personal profit?

____ what you learn very quickly in the rainforest is that it's hard work to deforest.

You only do it __ youre planning to sell the wood or plant something on the soil, otherwise
you know it's hot,

it's thick, ____ difficult to deforest.

So no-one's doing it for fun it's not like a weekend activity.

Exactly right. So the ____ is to make forests worth more alive than dead.

What if - stay with me - we pay the trees for sucking carbon dioxide out of our air?
In the late 1980s small experiments were started in ______ like Costa Rica, Colombia and
Brazil.

Villages were paid in hopes it would encourage them to _______ patches of forest instead of

cutting them down but it didn't always work.

So we observed that ______ a community in one area

wasn't sufficient because what would happen is a community could take that money ___ then
use

it to deforest around the mountain on the other side.

Oh come on guys.

_____ decided they needed to go bigger.

Entire countries would need to be paid for the service their trees _______.

I thought this was such an obvious concept it would take one or two years for everyone to
understand ____.

15 years later were still working on it.

Kevin's being modest. There is now an international agreement for the ______ he helped set
up: Red plus.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation.

Some details are still being ironed out ___ it's designed to allow countries to pay each other
to help fight climate change by keeping trees alive.

__ how does it work? I mean you look at a tree, how do you calculate how much carbon is
______ in it?

How much it's worth? How much of a job it's doing?

Well that's not as hard as __ sounds. You have to learn different tree species and their
densities, right. A hard wood

basically pulls in more ______ than a soft wood, so you need to know what type of tree it is,
you need to know ___ many of them are in a hectare so

we come up with these estimates, again they are only estimates, ___ it entails scientists
running

out and measuring trees and you know taking in a fallen tree ___ studying it. But once you
get...
Hang on because sorry sorry whoa whoa whoa whoa because __ my mind youre taking
satellite

images youre not sending scientists out with a tape measure?

Well __ youre doing both right.

Thankfully we don't need to send a scientist to the Amazon with a ruler ___ tell them not

to come back until theyve measured every tree.

Detailed calculations can be scaled up _____ satellite images and a price assigned for the job
the living forest is doing.

Red is far from ___ only scheme to put a price on nature in this way. At the recent UN
climate

__________, countries agreed a rule book to govern the trade of what are known as carbon
credits.

____ Stege represented the Marshall Islands as part of the negotiations, a group of low-lying

atolls theyre ___ of the most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change.

Basically what you have is _________ that produce quite a bit of carbon in their greenhouse
gas

emissions and then we have ______ developed nations, or nations like mine, who have really

very few emissions. And there is a ______ where those with more can put money into those
with less.

This basically means countries which ____ forests that store more carbon than the nation
produces

can be paid by richer nations to ______ a bit of their carbon emissions too.

The idea is that everyone has to become carbon neutral so ___ do we do that? We have to
reduce emissions ourselves

but what happens if we can't __ that fast enough. Should we be paying someone else to
reduce if they

can go faster ____ us? So the idea is that all of us have to get to the end point, let's pay

those that can move the fastest.

I want to take you somewhere this idea is already taking root.

______ can you guess where this is?

That is the beautiful sound of summer in Belfast city centre right?

Sadly ___. It's Gabon on the west coast of Africa.

Right now I'm stood up at the Raponda Walker Arboretum. It __ located at Akanda. We call
it the Wood of the Giant

that is another name.

Standing in the shade __ these giants is journalist Gloria Bivigou.

How sort of wide are they?

Wide?

I mean if you tried to ___ one now, how far do your arms go around the trunk?

I shall give a hug to the ____.

Go on, give it a go for me.

OK, these trees!

Right now I'm under a big tree and ____ very big. When I try to give a hug I can't even
embrace them.

And people call us ____ huggers. Well a whopping 80% of Gabon is covered in forest just
like this.

And it's ________ become the first African country to receive payment to protect its
rainforest

as part of a _________ deal.

Norway has agreed to pay Gabon $150 million over 10 years for these forests to absorb
carbon dioxide ____ their emissions.

It could be just in time. Gloria says forests are important to the people of Gabon.

____ like it's part of their culture. They grew up around the forest what is inside the forest
can even __ used for health.

Forest plants are used to treat malaria, stomach pain and other illnesses.

But Gabon is developing, ___ population growing.

The government itself is willing to build for example more hospitals, more schools, more
houses - many ___ the poor ones

and I think if you want to develop you go to a place who is ___ inhabited and
maybe they will be tempted to destroy our forest.

Of course from a climate perspective the hope __ that Gabon can use the money from
Norway to help it develop while it protects its forests allowing

them to keep locking away carbon emissions.

But it's not clear there are any requirements on where, or how _____ millions of dollars
should be spent.

Norway paid Gabon it was in June, $17 million. Right now the __________ hasn't said what
they have done with this money.

I even think that some of the local communities don't know anything about this money.

I heard about this money from Norway. This news warmed my heart

because we are fighting every day to try to preserve our environment.

Given to realities that ___ frightening as the sea is advancing in leaps and bounds.

Weve heard about this money through the media but we don't know if we are going to
receive it.

The forest is a great wealth ___ us. It is from the forest that we eat, breathe and live.

So you just don't know how ____ money is going to be spent at all?

I can't tell you, I really can't tell. Since Gabon ________ this money weve not heard anything
from them.

Now there's no evidence Gabon is doing anything bad with ____ money. The government's
say theyre putting together

a plan to invest it in ways to tackle _______ change - there are just no details available yet.

Kevin Conrad says from a climate perspective __ doesn't actually matter what they spend it
on.

If you try to micromanage from the beginning and attach too many strings to every dollar

it creates so much friction that countries give __ and don't even want to engage.

So weve got to flip it, weve got to have trust but weve got to have trust with transparency.

It's the same kind of thing they were doing ____ the Iran and the nuclear right youve got to

trust and then youve got to be ____ to verify and that is the way we can move at pace and at
scale.
So __ Gabon theyre in the dark about how the money is being spent. Outsiders worry about
whether

___ trees may be cut down.

On that point there is a check. Countries have to report to the UN _____ couple of years
about what theyre doing.

These reports are public and independently reviewed.

So think about it this ___ let's assume Gabon gets that money and wastes it. Now next year

what will happen there ____ be no money going to stop deforestation and deforestation rises
again.

So Gabon now sees that __ is in breach of its agreement so Gabon understands that it

has to put money in ___ right place if it wants to keep this payment system coming.

Beyond the detail of what was agreed __ Norway and Gabon there are wider criticisms of
putting

a price on nature.

Here's the British ______ and activist George Monbiot talking about it at a public lecture.

The pricing, the valuation the monetisation, the ________________ of nature.

In the name of saving it. Oh sorry did I say nature? We don't call it that _______. It's now
called

natural capital and ecological processes are called ecosystem services because of course they

exist only to service. And hills, forests, rivers, I hope you don't call them that anymore that's

terribly outdated terms - they are now called green infrastructure.

I love a good walking green ______________.

He's saying trying to put a price on nature is like trying to compare apples and pears.

Or apples ___ a supernova, apples and your best friend's smile, apples and a developing
country's chance to grow.

To him it ____ doesn't work.

Tina Stege from the Marshall Islands can see where he's coming from.

Nature is your home. I _____ know if you put a value on that in the Marshalls. We don't sell
land.
You inherit land as ____ of your family, as part of a larger clan. Those sales if they do
happen, and theyre very rare

___ quite fraught because youre not selling just a piece of property, it's a heritage of which
many, many ______ take part.

But to protect that heritage Tina thinks the world needs practical solutions.

To some extent you ____ were in a world that has put a price on nature, that exploits nature.

And living within that world __ have to decide how best to essentially make sure that nature
is protected

and that some of that benefit __ that activity in fact supports our people.

If carbon credits are going to be traded there should be a ____ book to set out how it can be
done fairly.

Folks, countries, businesses are either trading credits already or _______ to buy credits.

It's happening and what we need to do is make sure that it's happening in _ principled and
controlled way

with you know the proper safeguards in place. And that is on us to make ____ that those
protections are there.

If we don't do it who's going to do it? It needs to be _____ whose survival is at stake.

So at the UN's climate conference in Glasgow last year Tina and a group __ other
representatives from the small island developing states

came together to try and add what she calls "guard rails" __ the agreement.

That includes making sure that there's no double counting when a trade is done.

You can't have _ carbon copy of your carbon credits promising both Norway and say Japan
that the same patch of forest is __________ both of their emissions.

We also fought very hard to put in something that we call overall mitigation of __________
gas emissions.

That means some credits taken off the table. They can't all be sold to offset big emitters.

_____ emissions will have to keep reducing, rather than just being moved around.

The third principle is something called a _____ of proceeds for adaptation. So some of those
credits are also supposed to go into what is the adaptation

fund so that countries like mine actually can have some access to funds that we need
to just survive.

Why is all this necessary?

Because carbon credits aren't new. Theyve been traded for years. What's _________ now is
an attempt to formalise what has recently been a wild west.

There is clearly risk of carbon ___________. One is carbon credits are stolen from
developing

countries before they know what they have.

What do ___ mean by stolen, how on earth can you steal a carbon credit?

You steal it by taking it out __ a developing country without the developing countries
approval and that's happening.

Ill give you an example. In Papua New ______ we have some guys from America who are in
Papua New Guinea telling the landowners theyre going

__ give them 30% of the profits of whatever they sell the carbon for. Now anyone who
knows how

to run a business knows that profits are largely manufactured right, so their profits can be as
____

or low as they want and these credits are being sold and the government didn't even ____
anything

about it. They weren't there to protect the communities they weren't there to actually assess

that it was a fair transaction and this is what's going on with many of these voluntary
________.

That's crazy.

Well it's happening at scale all over the world and you know companies are ______ them.

Youll have all these companies going "'were carbon neutral with all these

voluntary credits" and _ keep saying look youre trading in stolen goods.

So far weve largely been talking about governments paying ____ other

to protect natural resources.

But of course there's a whole other side to this equation.

Two-thirds __ the economy is private sector so all if you look at the impacts on nature two-
thirds of them are ______ from the corporate world.
Now if we don't explain to the corporate world, "look these are your impacts" how ___ they
gonna ever figure out what is the right thing to do.

Enter Pavan Sukhdev. You met him at ___ start of the program. He's the one who calculates
businesses environmental impact.

Take Sweden's largest forestry _______.

About 20% of their land is conservation forest and they allow people access to their forests
for you know _________ mushrooms

and bilberries and lingonberries and all the stuff that grows there and it's free.

Not ____ are people given a helping hand with their winter baking the trees also capture

carbon dioxide __ they grow.

So theyre doing a number of public positive goods

which are not being calculated at all and ____ they did that calculation, we did that for them,

they found out that they were not ____ a little machine that makes 1.1 billion

Swedish kroner payer for his shareholder, the government, ___ actually it makes something

more like nine to ten billion dollars if you account for all __ these positive public values.

It's good for companies to recognise the value of all of their _________.

But to drive change it needs to show up on the bottom line and that's where _______ a price
on

nature really plays a role.

An investor knows that her investment in this carbon ________ company could bite her
really hard at some point

so she needs some comfort okay, something's being done about ____, what's the company
doing about this, are they covering their emissions.

Money gets our attention, we ____ that.

Were never going to be able to put an exact value on nature, it's priceless.

But using money __ a proxy for nature's value could get us to act.

This is far from the perfect solution but who ____ it has to be.

Didn't you say that exact line in another program?

Yep.

We made another program _____ giving nature legal rights and in that we kind of discussed

giving dolphins the rights to ___ us or you know giving a river legal standing in a courtroom

could help us reframe ___ relationship with nature, help us

think about it in a different way than just you ____ a landscape that can do things for us.

What relationship do you think this idea, giving nature _ monetary value creates?

Well I guess it depends whether you speak to lawyers or you speak to economists. __ a
lawyer will tell you you need

to sue in order to succeed and that's sort of the stick and I would say you need a carrot.

Humans respond to both incentives and you need to use both in a very tactful way. We prefer
to use

start with an incentive and if ___ incentive is being misused or breached then you use the
stick.

That's all weve got time for this ____. Thanks to the whole team, researcher Natasha
Fernandez,

producer Darin Graham, series producer Alex Lewis and ______ Puddifoot who made it all
sound lovely.