20 February 2021 | New Scientist | 5FOR a government-backed report, the
recently published Dasgupta Review
on the economics of biodiversity,
commissioned by the UK Treasury
in 2019, is blunt in its critique of
mainstream economic thinking.
“We may have increasingly queried
the absence of Nature from official
conceptions of economic possibilities,
but the worry has been left for Sundays,”
the distinguished University of
Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta
writes in his preface. “On week-days,
our thinking has remained as usual.”
The naturalist David Attenborough
is still blunter about the consequences
in the report’s foreword. “We are facing
a global crisis. We are totally dependent
upon the natural world. It supplies us
with every oxygen-laden breath we takeand every mouthful of food we eat. Yet we
are currently damaging it so profoundly
that many of its natural systems are now
on the verge of breakdown.”
Our understanding of the web of
dependencies that link us to the natural
world is perhaps 30 or 40 years behind
the science of climate change. But weknow enough to declare our assault
on Earth’s biodiversity and natural
ecosystems a crisis of similar magnitude –
one that no government, company or
individual can now afford to ignore.
This special issue on the state of the
natural world and how we can restoreit appears in this context (see page 34).
It is the first of a series of features on
biodiversity, produced in association
with the United Nations Environment
Programme, that will appear over the
coming weeks. It reflects a renewed focus
on all aspects of our environmental
impact as the world seeks to build back
better from the covid-19 pandemic.
This crisis has been a wake-up
call that human health and wealth
are dependent on the health of the
ecosystems around us. Clean water and
air, fertile soils, reduced risk of diseases
jumping from animals to us, and all the
other “ecosystem services” that a healthy
natural world gives us for free aren’t
“nice-to-have” fripperies. For all our sakes,
we must work to resolve the crisis we have
precipitated – every day of the week. ❚The value of nature
Covid-19 is a wake-up call to halt our abuse of the ecosystems that support us
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