Queensland's Daintree Rainforest, thought to have existed for 135 million years, is the oldest in the world. The World Heritage Site contains more rare and endangered plant and animals than any other.

Credit: iStockphoto

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POTSDAM, Germany: World environment ministers commissioned a report on Friday to seek the economic value of all the Earth's depleted biodiversity.

Inspired by last year's Stern Report - a shock dossier on the economic cost of climate change - the ministers now call for a similar study on the value of Earth's many millions of species.

As many as 150 become extinct each day, or a thousand times faster than natural processes. Yet there is lamentably little knowledge about what these species do and whether they can be of value, said German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel.

Biological diversity is not just the key to food supplies, through soil fertility and healthy fisheries, it also amounts to a goldmine for the pharmaceutical industry, said Gabriel.

"In a global study, we will initiate the process of analysing the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the costs of effective conservation," the so-called Potsdam Initiative said.

The meeting at the Cecilienhof Chateau - where the 1945 Potsdam agreement that reshaped Europe was hammered out - gathered together the 'Group of Eight' industrialised countries and the big five of the developing world: Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.

The initiative will be put to the G8 summit in June for endorsement.

Gabriel, who chaired the two-day meeting, told reporters: biodiversity "is not just an issue for birdwatchers." It has been treated as "a poor relation," granted only rare and fleeting attention by politicians or economists before now, he said.

Separately, the ministers swapped some ideas about how to tackle global warming, an issue that remains mired in problems.

The 13 countries account for more than two-thirds of the world's carbon emissions; the invisible gases that trap heat from the Sun and threaten havoc with the planet's delicate climate system.

Negotiations are under way for the Kyoto Protocol's post-2012 format, when the climate agreement runs out. But the big challenge is to coax an agreement from the United States and tough commitments from big developing countries, which all fear the economic burden of switching to cleaner, more fuel-efficient technology.

At a summit last week, the 27-nation European Union pledged to cut its own greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 and deepen it to 30 per cent if "international partners" follow suit.

Meanwhile, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported on Thursday that the Earth had its warmest December-February period since records began 128 years ago. A record warm January worldwide pushed average temperatures in December-February to 0.72°C above normal for the 20th century.

On 16 March, The Japan Meteorological Agency reported the latest first snowfall of the winter ever recorded in Tokyo.

European countries - where temperatures from December through February were more than 2°C above average - have reported that crops are being planted a month early, markets are bursting with prematurely ripened produce and animals are migrating too soon or not at all.