The global system is built on buying and selling, but often no one pays for the most basic goods and services that sustain life – water to drink, land to grow food, clean air to breathe, rainforests that regulate the climate.
To continue to ignore the value of nature in our world economy threatens humanity itself, according to an independent report on biodiversity and economics, commissioned by the British government and released on Tuesday. The study, led by Partha Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge, is the first comprehensive review of its kind.
“Although we have enjoyed the fruits of economic growth, the demand we have placed on nature’s goods and services has for decades surpassed its ability to provide it on a sustainable basis,” he said. Dasgupta said. “The gap is widening, threatening our descendants’ lives.”
The report has for many people an intangible or spiritual value that is impossible to measure. But nature’s services to humans have been taken for granted in our world economy, because they are mostly free to accept. People are farming, fishing, poaching, logging, mining and burning fossil fuels so fast that we have caused a biodiversity collapse. Up to a million species of plants and animals are in danger of disappearing, and world leaders are failing.
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 within a portfolio of natural assets increases the resilience of nature to withstand shocks,” he said. Dasgupta said. “Globally, climate change and Covid-19 are a striking expression of the loss of nature’s resilience.”
Economically, the report describes nature itself as an asset. It provides a new economic model for leaders around the world to make calculations that bring the benefits of nature, for example the way wetlands protect against floods and peatlands store large amounts of carbon.
“What the Dasgupta report does really well highlights the value of what Mother Nature gives us without claiming a salary,” said Matthew E. Kahn, an environmental economist at Johns Hopkins University. ‘If you go to Starbucks, Starbucks wants to be paid for that cup of coffee. Mother Nature provides services, but she does not demand a stream of payments. ”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Prince Charles and David Attenborough all spoke on Tuesday during the release of the report, praising the project and calling for action.
“It’s pure madness to continue on this path,” Prince Charles said. “Sir Partha Dasgupta’s core review is a call to action that we need to pay attention to, ladies and gentlemen, it falls on our watch and we must not fail.”
The report begins, the report reads, by understanding that our economies are embedded in nature, not outside it. We need to change how we measure economic success, says the gross domestic product, not the depreciation of assets, including the environment. “As the most important measure of economic success,” the authors write, “it therefore encourages us to pursue unsustainable economic growth and development.”
International arrangements are needed to manage certain environments on which the entire planet relies, the report said. It calls on leaders to explore a system of payments to countries for the conservation of critical ecosystems such as tropical rainforests, which store carbon, regulate climate and nurture biodiversity. Fees may be levied for the use of ecosystems outside national borders, such as for fishing on the high seas, and international cooperation may prohibit fishing in ecologically sensitive areas.
The release of the report comes before a United Nations meeting on biodiversity later this year; environmentalists hope it will have an international agreement to confront 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, that is not part of the underlying UN treaty on biodiversity.
Conservation groups welcomed the report.
“The idea that we are part of nature and that natural capital is an asset that needs to be managed sustainably will not surprise indigenous communities that have valued nature through the ages,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the campaign for Nature. “But for those who have adopted economic systems based on unlimited growth, it is a fundamental rethinking of how ‘progress’ is valued and measured. ‘