With this in mind, the German Federal Ministry for the Environment and the European Commission, with the support of several other partners, have jointly initiated preparatory work for this global study, which is named ‘The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity (TEEB)’. Mr Pavan Sukhdev, Managing Director and Head of Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets business in India, and a Founder-Director of the ‘Green Accounting for Indian States Project’, an initiative of the Green Indian States Trust (GIST) to set up an economic valuation and national accounting framework to measure sustainability for India, was appointed as the independent Study Leader. He is assisted in his task by an Advisory Board, which consists of prominent experts. The study will evaluate the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the associated decline in ecosystem services worldwide, and compare them with the costs of effective conservation and sustainable use. It is intended that it will sharpen awareness of the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services and facilitate the development of cost-effective policy responses, notably by preparing a ‘valuation toolkit’. TEEB is being conducted in two phases. Preliminary findings from the first phase have been presented by Minister Gabriel, Commissioner Dimas and Mr Pavan Sukhdev at the High-Level Segment of the Ninth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP-9) in Bonn, Germany, in May 2008, in the form of an interim report (pdf ~8MB), also available in French: rapport d’étape (pdf ~3.5 MB).