The Nature-Based Economy

Nature is our ‘natural capital’. Healthy ecosystems and biodiversity fundamentally underpin our economy and society at large. However, to date, we have failed to recognise the true value of our natural capital – we have assumed that nature is abundant and an endless resource to be extracted from, cleared, fished, dumped into without consideration of the cumulative effects of those actions. Most significantly, we have never accounted for natural capital in financial statements. That is all changing, and it is likely to change very rapidly.

The planet is exhausted. We are facing an unprecedented point in human history: both because of the rapid decline in nature we have witnessed in our lifetimes and because we hold the future of the planet in our hands. This decade is the critical decade for action to address the multiple pressures on nature and biodiversity – of which climate change is just one. I am hopeful we will meet this challenge, armed with the knowledge that this is not just an environmental issue, but that it is a critical economic one.