It’s time to go back to high school. Students are excited about the new beginning. But for many kids, the first day is more about friends than classes, and maybe with good reason. On that day, the teacher takes attendance (考勤), hands out books, and describes the teaching plan. If a student hears the same things in seven classes, you can’t blame (责备) them for thinking it’s going to be another long year. When the high schoolers’ parents ask what they did in school, it’s pretty likely that the answer will be “Nothing.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Kids always want exciting changes, and you can give them a taste of how interesting your course will be. One English teacher asks students to write 77 words about what they want to get out of her class. Then she reads their responses (回答) out aloud. She keeps the responses until the last day of the school year when she hands them back to students so they can see if they achieved what they wanted. After encouraging kids with a year-long game, she begins the English course.

On the first day of science, a teacher gives students 30 minutes to build something to improve people’s lives. A history teacher organizes a debate on whether Swiss cheese is better than cheddar. In math class, another teacher puts students in groups of three, and gives them six minutes to come up with as many answers as possible to the question, “What is math good for?”

The new class activities are part of our school wide movement to improve the first day of classes. Many teachers choose to use creative ways to encourage kids from day one. And all students seem to enjoy the changes. Quite a few parents told me that their kids said, “I think English (or math or biology or Spanish) is going to be great!”

Researchers propose that governments apply a new approach for calculating the benefits that arise from conserving biodiversity and nature for future generations. The approach can be used by governments in cost-benefit analyses for public infrastructure(基础设施) projects, in which spaces for animal and plant species and ecosystem services are converted into the current monetary value, such as the recreational(娱乐的) value.

This process of the new method is designed to make biodiversity loss and the benefits of nature conservation more visible in political decision-making. However, the international research team say current methods for calculating the values of ecosystem services fall short and have designed the new approach, which they believe could easily be employed in treasury analysis supporting future budget statements.

Their approach, published in the journal Science, takes into consideration the increase in monetary value of nature over time as human income increases, as well as the likely decline in biodiversity, making it more of a scarce(稀缺的) resource. This contrasts with current methods, which do not consider how the value of ecosystem services changes over time.

Two factors play a key role in this value adjustment: On the one hand, as incomes go up, people are willing to pay more to conserve nature. On the other hand, the services provided by ecosystems will become more valuable when they become scarcer.

“The fact that scarce goods become more expensive is a fundamental principle in economics, and it also applies here. And in view of current developments, unfortunately, we must expect the loss of biodiversity to continue,” said Moritz Drupp, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the University of Hamburg and lead author of this study.