As we debate how best to integrate environmental and economic goals, it is perhaps worth remembering that even central bankers need to eat, drink and inhale clean air. Food and water security, protection from climatic extremes, the carbon cycle, public health and the replenishment of the very air we breathe all depend on nature. It is less that nature is part of our economy, and rather that our entire economic system is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature.
During recent years there has been a series of expert reviews revealing the scale of the social and economic risks that accompany the continued degradation of nature. Some interpret these findings as a reason to oppose economic growth. The key question is, however, not about growth per se, but the style and quality of growth that we pursue. Growth that results in the destruction of nature will, in the end, cease. Economic development that, by contrast, moves toward net zero greenhouse gas emissions and the recovery of nature is a very different prospect.
There are compelling examples of countries that have chosen this strategy. In the 1980s Costa Rica’s government decided to break the mould of growth generated by environmental destruction, and instead embarked on a programme of nature recovery. Fast-forward to the 2010s and the country had doubled not only natural forest cover, but also per capita GDP.
Here in the UK there is clear evidence of the benefits of adopting a similarly integrated approach. Restoring 55% of UK peatlands to near natural condition would store carbon to the value of at least £45bn, according to a study for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Creating 100,000 hectares of wetland upstream of major towns and cities can yield a benefits-to-costs ratio of up to 9:1. Nature is also a major factor in the welfare of our population, with one report estimating that in 2020 the health benefits of outdoor recreation were at least £6.2bn.
Nature also underpins major companies. Natural Capital Finance estimates that 13 of the 18 sectors that made up the FTSE 100 in 2018 had processes highly dependent on natural capital (such as food and water), equivalent to almost three-quarters of the FTSE 100’s market capitalisation. The UK’s stock of natural capital assets upon which these benefits are based were estimated in 2019 to be worth £1.2tn. Globally, the services provided by ecosystems sustain benefits worth an estimated $125tn a year – more than one-and-a-half times the size of global GDP. With the benefit of all this knowledge, growing GDP while degrading the natural systems that enable it to exist in the first place is surely the economics of the madhouse.
This is especially the case when the costs of neglecting nature are revealed. A 2021 study estimated that the global costs arising from environmental damage are already around $7tn per year and will double in a decade. Subtracting these costs from crude measures of GDP growth, it becomes clear that narrow measures of economic progress are in fact an illusion derived from incomplete measurement.
The UK has been on a path that could deliver the joined-up economic recovery that is necessary in the face of the climate and nature emergencies, one that generates jobs and wealth at the same time as net zero carbon emissions and recovery of the natural world. The post-EU farming policy and the toolkit in the 2021 Environment Act are among the powerful new levers we have to drive forward on targets for environmental recovery, in the process stimulating innovation, resilience, and food and water security. The opportunity to use these and other policies and targets to foster both economic and environmental growth for the long term is ahistoric opportunity, and one that government and its partners have invested a great deal of effort in during recent years.
As the government’s advisers and delivery partners on nature, Natural England looks forward to working with our wide range of partners in taking forward our purpose to conserve and enhance the natural environment, ensuring the sustainability of the economic recovery the country is working towards.
Tony Juniper CBE is chair of Natural England. Before taking up this role in April 2019, he was executive director for Advocacy and Campaigns at WWF-UK, a Fellow with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and president of the Wildlife Trusts