Alarm over high rate of species disappearance

“I always ask: ‘Where’s the business proposal?’,” said Gunter Pauli, head of Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives which looks for opportunities in nature. Many pharmaceutical firms rely on nature. Among recent examples, scientists developed the malaria drug artemisinin from sweet wormwood, while the Madagascan periwinkle and Pacific yew tree have both yielded treatments for cancer.

Beyond medicines, firms are looking to “biomimicry”, tricks evolved by nature such as adhesives inspired by the feet of gecko lizards that can walk on ceilings, or cellphone screens imitating iridescent butterfly wings to generate colours.

Companies including Royal Dutch Shell, Dupont and Nike work with the Montana-based Biomimicry Guild, which seeks to identify new ideas.

“It’s so fun to see the light go on in their eyes. They can see ‘we can make money and do the right thing’,” said Sherry Ritter of the Guild.

Still, Pauli said only three biomimicry products had secured annual turnover over 100 million euros ($144.3 million).

These are Velcro -- Swiss inventor George de Mestral was inspired in the 1940s by plant burrs trapped on his dog’s fur -- hypodermic needles which Terumo Corp modelled on the jab of a mosquito, and paints derived from a self-cleaning trick by the lotus plant, sold by US Sto Corp. and other groups.

“A lot are nice, romantic ideas,” Pauli said. “The abalone (shellfish) produces materials stronger than Kevlar: Correct. Commercial viability: zero. It’s too complicated.”

Among new business ideas, he said coffee farms in Colombia had created 10,000 jobs by using coffee waste as fertiliser to grow edible tropical mushrooms.

In turn, the remaining waste can be sold as animal feed.

“If you say: ‘can we talk about triple cash flows?’ then the entrepreneur gets interested,” he said, referring to the three income sources in such a project.

Studies showing the utilitarian value of nature are an extra reason for conservation, said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

It is only natural that these approaches, and the new data they generate, are receiving more attention since their estimates are suddenly becoming more robust, he said.

“Biodiversity decline is predominantly caused by economic activities in the broadest sense, and the policy debate all too often tends to pit ‘economic’ interests against ‘environmental’ interests. The recent work shows that this juxtaposition is fundamentally flawed,” he said.

The “Copenhagen Accord”, agreed by some nations at UN climate talks in 2009, will also seek to promote the use of tropical forests to soak up greenhouse gases, a new source of income for poor nations. Scientists are studying turtle blood for possible clues to stem bleeding in humans, for instance after surgery.

And the leatherbacks, the biggest species of turtle, can dive deeper than other turtles, leading experts to wonder how they regulate buoyancy.