The Dasgupta Review and the Economics of Biodiversity
“If we care about our common future and the common future of our descendants, we should all in part be naturalists.”
Dr. Sir Partha Dasgupta, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, Feb. 2021
Image source: Author
I had a quick look through the Dasgupta Review which was published on the UK Government website on 2nd February. Dr. Sir Partha Dasgupta has put some 40 years of thinking behind this report which attempts to examine the economics of biodiversity. This is a clever and brave piece of work. Clever in how it tries to communicate an incredibly complex subject matter that interconnects with every corner of human existence on the planet. Brave in sticking to his long-held belief in the face of a dismissive cohort of economic experts who for years have peddled the myth of sustainable economic growth without environmental consequences. He proposes that we discard ‘gross domestic product’ as a measure of ‘growth’ and start to fold in a fair and equitable economic value of our take of the world’s natural capital. He suggests for example that the Amazon rainforest should be given an economic value for acting as the ‘world’s lungs’ and that we all pay towards its safeguarding. What I think is particularly brave is that Dr. Dasgupta tackles population in his methodology. It is a subject area we hear far too little about in sustainability circles as so few experts have the courage to bring it up. If we are serious about responding effectively to the climate emergency, world leaders better be talking about it at COP 26 in Glasgow. As Dr. Dasgupta said in his report, “…even the recent 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change made no mention of population”.
“We may have increasingly queried the absence of Nature from official conceptions of economic possibilities, but the worry has been left for Sundays. On week-days, our thinking has remained as usual.”
Dr. Sir Partha Dasgupta, The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, Feb. 2021
The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, stands on the shoulders of a fair few other thinkers on the subject. Ian McHarg for instance talked about nature doing the work of man in his hugely influential book Design with Nature which was published way back in 1968. In more recent times and from a slightly different angle, Hawkins, Lovins and Lovins in their book Natural Capitalism (1999) argued a similar line to Dasgupta pointing out that the traditional system of capitalism "…does not fully conform to its own accounting principles. It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs – the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital."
