OUR BLUE PLANET

The Blue Planet Prize is awarded every year to two individuals or organizations in recognition of their outstanding contributions to global environmental issues.
The 2024 winners are Professor Robert Costanza, University College London, who was the first to systematically estimate the economic value of the ecosystem services that nature provides to humanity, and IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a leading international organization that provides, promotes and assesses scientific knowledge on biodiversity, ecosystem services and all other benefits that nature provides to humankind.

Professor Robert Costanza has researched and studied the loss of coastal wetlands in Louisiana, USA, due to the impacts of local oil and gas development. This led him to think about the values that ecosystems and ecosystem services provide to people, and how these values can be translated into monetary terms.
In 1997, he published a report showing that the value of ecosystem services was worth more than $33 trillion per year, far more than the $18 trillion global GDP at the time. The program shows how he established the means to put a monetary value on ecosystem services. Today, Professor Costanza stresses the need to embrace the new measures that would replace GDP, the traditional measure used to define economic growth.
What are the limitations and uncertainties of GDP? The program follows the path of Professor Costanza's research and takes a deeper look at the value of ecosystem services and the problems with using GDP.

The other winner, IPBES, is an intergovernmental body driven and supported by UN agencies. It plays an important role in strengthening the bridge between science and policy, promoting the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity for the well-being of humanity.
IPBES has continued to highlight the importance of biodiversity in the global environment, which is equally relevant as global warming and climate change.
What is the importance of biodiversity that IPBES has communicated to the world? And what impact has it made on the world?
The program traces the outstanding achievements of IPBES through the reports it publishes each year.