Coronavirus is an ‘SOS signal for the human
enterprise’
UN environment chief and economist warn human wealth
depends on nature’s health
Damian
Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Published
onFri 5 Jun 2020 07.00 BST
The
coronavirus pandemic is an “SOS signal for the human enterprise”, according to
a leading economist and the United Nation’s environment chief, who warn that
current economic thinking does not recognise that human wealth depends on
nature’s health.
“The
language of economics is failing us [and] the result is that we miss the
message,” said Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta and the UN’s Inger Andersen in an
article published on Friday. “Our economies, livelihoods and wellbeing all rely
on nature, from the food we eat, to controlling our climate, regulating disease
and providing spiritual fulfilment. Without nature, there would be no life.”
The ongoing
destruction of nature has been blamed as the fundamental driver of diseases
that cross from wildlife into humans. In April, the world’s leading
biodiversity experts said even more deadly disease outbreaks were likely unless
the destruction is halted.
Dasgupta is
leading a major review on the economics of biodiversity for the UK government,
due to be published later in 2020, and Anderson is an adviser. A similar UK
government review on climate change led by Lord Nicholas Stern was highly
influential in making the economic case for environmental action.
“Covid-19
is an SOS signal for the human enterprise, bringing into sharp focus the need
to live within the planet’s ‘safe operating space’, and the disastrous
environmental, health and economic consequences of failing to do so,” said
Dasgupta and Anderson. “A key problem is the mismatch between the artificial
‘economic grammar’ which drives public and private policy and ‘nature’s syntax’
which determines how the real world operates.”
They said
‘natural capital’ – the planet’s stock of natural resources, like plants, soils
and minerals – should be valued alongside the values of produced capital, such
as roads, and human capital, such as skills. Together, these form a measure of
a country’s true wealth, they said.
Data from
the UN Environment Programme shows that the global stock of natural capital per
capita has declined nearly 40% since the early 1990s, while produced capital
has doubled and human capital has increased by 13%. “Unlike standard models of
economic growth and development, placing ourselves and our economies within
nature helps us to accept that our prosperity is ultimately bounded by that of
our planet,” Dasgupta and Anderson said.
“The
importance of taking decisions guided by the science has become all the more
apparent in recent months,” they said. “As discussions about the recovery
gather pace, economic and finance decisions must be guided by the science too.
From now on, protecting and enhancing our environment must be at the heart of
how we achieve economic prosperity.”
The largest
previous assessment of the economics of biodiversity was published on 2010 and
was led by Pavan Sukhdev, formerly at Deutsche Bank and now president of WWF
International and a UN environment ambassador.
“The blind
pursuit of profit at the expense of all else – it’s simply a fool’s dream and
sadly, we seem to have believed it,” Sukhdev said this week. “Nature also
provides a lot: you can estimate the economic cost you will incur by losing
nature’s services.”
“I think
the time has come for humanity to go through its next evolution,
intellectually, emotionally, and recognise that we can be different, we don’t
have to go back to the same old ways, business as usual,” he said.
The
prominent naturalist Jane Goodall said on Wednesday that the emergence of
Covid-19 was the result of the over-exploitation of the natural world. She said
humanity will be “finished” if we fail to drastically change our food systems.
Dasgupta
and Anderson said: “One truly worrying result of our over-demand is that
critical ecosystems are reaching tipping points.”
They said
ocean heatwaves were destroying coral reefs, with devastating economic impacts
on the large numbers of people that depend on them, while the felling of
tropical forests is pushing them dangerously close to tipping points that would
switch them to grassland, with enormous consequences for the climate crisis.
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