Rap+ director Trond Larsen was recently quoted in this article in Aspire, the business and first class magazine of Etihad Airways (seen by 6 million affluent travellers a year). While the world is preoccupied with species extinctions, new species are being discovered on an almost daily basis. Can these new creatures make a different case for conservation? "The overall goal of the RAP is to guide conservation priorities by exploring and describing poorly known ecosystems," says Larsen. "Without an objective understanding of which species exist and where they live, it is very difficult to make decisions about which places require the greatest conservation investments…" "Knowledge is the strongest tool to ensure the future of life on this planet, yet we still only know about one tenth of the species that occur around us," he says. "Species are disappearing before we are even aware of their existence. Discovering new species and mapping where they occur provides information that is vital in order to monitor how life on Earth is changing, and how to sustain it."

Without Earth's ecosystems, human life could not exist. But is there any way to place a monetary value on the "services" that the Earth provides civilization and human enterprises? And is there any value in pursuing such an exercise?