The global system is based on buying and selling, but often no one pays for the most basic goods and services that sustain life – water to drink, soil to grow food, fresh air to breathe, tropical forests that regulate the climate.
Continuing to ignore the value of nature in our global economy threatens humanity itself, according to an independent report on biodiversity and the economy, commissioned by the British government and published on Tuesday. The study, led by Partha Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge, is the first comprehensive review of its kind.
“Even though we have enjoyed the fruits of economic growth, the demand we make for nature’s goods and services has for some decades exceeded its capacity to supply them sustainably,” said Dasgupta. “The gap is widening, threatening the lives of our descendants.”
For many people, nature has an intangible or spiritual value impossible to measure, notes the report. But nature’s services to humans are taken for granted in our global economy, largely because they are usually free. Humans are farming, fishing, hunting, extracting wood, mining and burning fossil fuels so quickly that we cause biodiversity to collapse. Up to one million species of plants and animals are at risk of disappearing, and world leaders are failing to act.
In addition to the intangible losses that occur when a species disappears, this erosion of biodiversity poses tangible threats to humanity.
“Just as diversity in a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, diversity in a portfolio of natural assets increases nature’s resilience to withstand shocks,” said Dasgupta. “At the global level, climate change and Covid-19 are marked expressions of nature’s loss of resilience.”
In economic terms, the report reformulates nature itself as an asset. It offers a new economic model for leaders around the world to make calculations that take into account the benefits of nature, for example, how wetlands protect against flooding and peatlands store large amounts of carbon.
“What the Dasgupta report is doing very well is to highlight the value of what Mother Nature gives us without demanding a payment,” said Matthew E. Kahn, environmental economist at Johns Hopkins University. “When you go to Starbucks, Starbucks wants to be paid for that cup of coffee. Mother Nature is providing services, but it is not demanding a flow of payments ”.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Prince Charles and David Attenborough spoke at the report’s launch on Tuesday, praising the project and calling for action.
“It is crazy to continue on this path,” said Prince Charles. “Sir Partha Dasgupta’s seminal review is a call to action that we must pay attention to, ladies and gentlemen, it is up to our vigilance and we must not fail.”
The solution begins, says the report, with the understanding that our economies are embedded in nature, not external to it. We need to change the way we measure economic success, he insists, because gross domestic product does not take into account the depreciation of assets, including environmental ones. “As our main measure of economic success,” wrote the authors, “it encourages us to pursue unsustainable economic growth and development.”
International agreements are needed to manage certain environments on which the entire planet depends, says the report. It asks leaders to explore a system of payments to nations for the conservation of critical ecosystems, such as tropical forests, which store carbon, regulate the climate and nourish biodiversity. Fees could be charged for the use of ecosystems outside national borders, such as for offshore fishing, and international cooperation could prohibit fishing in ecologically sensitive areas.
The report is launched before a United Nations meeting on biodiversity later this year; Environmentalists hope that this will result in an international agreement to address the loss of biodiversity similar to the Paris Agreement on climate change. The United States is the only state in the world, apart from the Vatican, which is not part of the UN biodiversity treaty.
Conservation groups applauded the report.
“The idea that we are part of Nature and that natural capital is an asset that needs to be managed in a sustainable way will come as no surprise to indigenous communities that have valued nature over time,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature. “But for those who have adopted economic systems based on unlimited growth, this requires a fundamental rethink of how ‘progress’ is measured and measured.”