What price nature? £23bn a year to Scotland - the first country to value its natural environment

Scotland will become the first state in the world to put a price on the value of its natural environment and the benefits it provides, in a pioneering project which could transform the way it makes decisions on planning.

Academics have estimated that nature is worth between £21.5bn and £23bn a year to Scotland’s economy, but Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond wants a far more in-depth study. Supporters of the scheme argue that because most development decisions are based on narrow economic considerations, in terms of the direct costs and benefits, natural resources such as peat should be valued in the same way to ensure their importance is not overlooked.

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Lack of contact with nature 'increasing allergies'

A lack of exposure to a "natural environment" could be resulting in more urban dwellers developing allergies and asthma, research has suggested.

Finnish scientists say certain bacteria, shown to be beneficial for human health, are found in greater abundance in non-urban surroundings.

The microbiota play an important role in the development and maintenance of the immune system, they add.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"There are microbes everywhere, including in the built environment, but the composition is different between natural environments and human-built areas," explained co-author Ilkka Hanski from the University of Helsinki.

"The microbiota in natural environments is more beneficial for us," he told BBC News.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17952320

Why Letting Salmon Escape Could Benefit Bears and Fishers

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2012) — New research suggests that allowing more Pacific salmon to spawn in coastal streams will not only benefit the natural environment, including grizzly bears, but could also lead to more salmon in the ocean and thus larger salmon harvests in the long term -- a win-win for ecosystems and humans. In a new article and accompanying synopsis published April 10 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology, Taal Levi and co-authors from UC Santa Cruz and Canada investigate how increasing "escapement" -- the number of salmon that escape fishing nets to enter streams and spawn -- can improve the natural environment.

"Salmon are an essential resource that propagates through not only marine but also creek and terrestrial food webs," said lead author Levi, an environmental studies Ph.D. candidate at UCSC, specializing in conservation biology and wildlife ecology.

Salmon fisheries in the northwest Pacific are generally well managed, Levi said. Managers determine how much salmon to allocate to spawning and how much to harvest. Fish are counted as they enter the coastal streams. However, there is concern that humans are harvesting too many salmon and leaving too little for the ecosystem. To assess this, the team focused on the relationship between grizzly bears and salmon. Taal and his colleagues first used data to find a relationship between how much salmon were available to eighteen grizzly bear populations in British Columbia, and what percentage of their diet was made up of salmon.

Continued:   http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120410210939.htm