In my last post, I mentioned how the Bureau of Labor Statistics contacted me for additional info on my proposal to make Ecosystem Health Care and Assistance” a top-tier listing in the Federal government’s “North American Industry Classification System” (NAICS) 5-year revision process happening now. For background, please see my first post on this subject from April 2008)

Last week, I got another call from the Census Bureau.  What I’m told is that revisions to NAICS are being researched by several agencies.  As I was talking, I recalled many other interesting links that can help people understand the already huge size of the “ecosystems sector”.  I’ve included them at this end of this post.

My point in all this is that taking care of the health of ecosystems is already so big that it should be included at the highest level of the NAICS system.  If the Federal government will make this change to the system, it will have a significant impact on the economy because the NAICS category system is used so broadly in everything from job listing sites to investment indexes, and simply seeing that the “ecosystem sector” is top-tier in NAICS will reframe the global dialogue about economy and ecology.

Here are some examples of infrastructure-scale projects that rely on the health of ecosystems for their economic function:

• The restoration of the Catskills watershed that provide drinking water to New York City allowed the city to save billions of dollars compared to expanding their mechanical water treatment system: http://www.epa.gov/Region2/water/nycshed/protprs.htm
• Many huge water-related ecosystem projects like the multi-billion dollar ecological restoration of the Everglades water system in Florida are listed at http://dels.nas.edu/water/eco_restor.php

Environmental Business Journal has a wealth of reports on US and global economic activity in this space: http://environmental-industry.com/

The website Ecosystem Marketplace documents how globally, ecosystem markets and incentives are increasing rapidly to help grow this new ecological economy: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com

The “Rise Report” published in 2003 showed that over $2.6 billion was invested in “double bottom line” Private Equity strategies focused on environmental and/or social benefits: http://www.riseproject.org/uzrise_capmkt_rpt_03.pdf.  This number has grown considerably since then.  The latest “green” private investment figures are available from http://cleantech.com

Tags: Census Bureau, ecosystem sector, North American Industry Classification System

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Actions, Commentary, Revising NAICS. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.