The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review – GOV.UK link to Dasgupta review reports

The link provides a full suite of reports.

The Dasgupta Review sits very well with the environmental economics paradigm promoted by Natural Living Assets. The Dasgupta review provides an excellent economic appraisal of the value of Natural Ecological Economic Assets and how established economic and financial decision making will impact Natural asset value.

Forward taken from Dasgupta Review by David Attenborough below.

Foreword
We are facing a global crisis. We are totally dependent upon the natural world. It supplies us
with every oxygen-laden breath we take and every mouthful of food we eat. But we are currently
damaging it so profoundly that many of its natural systems are now on the verge of breakdown.
Every other animal living on this planet, of course, is similarly dependent. But in one crucial way,
we are different. We can change not just the numbers, but the very anatomy of the animals and
plants that live around us. We acquired that ability, doubtless almost unconsciously, some ten
thousand years ago, when we had ceased wandering and built settlements for ourselves. It was
then that we started to modify other animals and plants.

At first, doubtless, we did so unintentionally. We collected the kinds of seeds that we wanted
to eat and took them back to our houses. Some doubtless fell to the ground and sprouted
the following season. So over generations, we became farmers. We domesticated animals
in a similar way. We brought back the young of those we had hunted, reared them in our
settlements and ultimately bred them there. Over many generations, this changed both the
bodies and ultimately the characters of the animals on which we depend.
We are now so mechanically ingenious that we are able to destroy a rainforest, the most
species-rich ecosystem that has ever existed, and replace it with plantations of a single species in
order to feed burgeoning human populations on the other side of the world. No single species
in the whole history of life has ever been so successful or so dominant.

Now we are plundering every corner of the world, apparently neither knowing or caring what
the consequences might be. Each nation is doing so within its own territories. Those with lands
bordering the sea fish not only in their offshore waters but in parts of the ocean so far from land
that no single nation can claim them. So now we are stripping every part of both the land and
the sea in order to feed our ever-increasing numbers.
How has the natural world managed to survive this unrelenting ever-increasing onslaught by a
single species? The answer of course, is that many animals have not been able to do so. When
Europeans first arrived in southern Africa they found immense herds of antelope and zebra.
These are now gone and vast cities stand in their stead. In North America, the passenger pigeon
once flourished in such vast flocks that when they migrated, they darkened the skies from
horizon to horizon and took days to pass. So they were hunted without restraint. Today, that
species is extinct. Many others that lived in less dramatic and visible ways simply disappeared
without the knowledge of most people worldwide and were mourned only by a few naturalists.
Nonetheless, in spite of these assaults, the biodiversity of the world is still immense. And
therein lies the strength that has enabled much of its wildlife to survive until now. Economists
understand the wisdom of spreading their investments across a wide range of activities. It
enables them to withstand disasters that may strike any one particular asset. The same is true
in the natural world. If conditions change, either climatically or as a consequence of a new
development in the never-ending competition between species, the ecosystem as a whole is able
to maintain its vigour.

But consider the following facts. Today, we ourselves, together with the livestock we rear for
food, constitute 96% of the mass of all mammals on the planet. Only 4% is everything else –
from elephants to badgers, from moose to monkeys. And 70% of all birds alive at this moment
are poultry – mostly chickens for us to eat. We are destroying biodiversity, the very characteristic
that until recently enabled the natural world to flourish so abundantly. If we continue this
damage, whole ecosystems will collapse. That is now a real risk.
Putting things right will take collaborative action by every nation on earth. It will require
international agreements to change our ways. Each ecosystem has its own vulnerabilities and
requires its own solutions. There has to be a universally shared understanding of how these
systems work, and how those that have been damaged can be brought back to health.
This comprehensive, detailed and immensely important report is grounded in that
understanding. It explains how we have come to create these problems and the actions we must
take to solve them. It then provides a map for navigating a path towards the restoration of our
planet’s biodiversity.

Economics is a discipline that shapes decisions of the utmost consequence, and so matters
to us all. The Dasgupta Review at last puts biodiversity at its core and provides the compass
that we urgently need. In doing so, it shows us how, by bringing economics and ecology
together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so,
save ourselves.
David Attenborough