[Birdsong]
Our economies, livelihoods and our well-being all depend on our most precious asset:
nature.
We are embedded in nature, we're part of nature, intrinsically tied into it.
Nature provides us with our food, shelter,
it regulates the climate, cleanses the water we drink, it fixes nitrogen, offers us pollination.
In fact it's impossible to think of anything we do which isn't built around what nature provides.
Estimates of our total demand of nature suggest that we would need roughly
1.6 Earths to satisfy our current demand
and we haven't got an additional 0.6 Earths.
Humanity now faces an urgent choice.
The demands we make on nature vastly exceeds
nature's ability to supply them on a sustainable basis.
If we continue this path, then nature will be further degraded and our civilizations will suffer.
In conventional thinking when we talk about economic progress
the one item that is missing is nature.
While humanity has prospered immensely in recent decades
we have done so at the expense of nature.
We have accumulated produced capital and human capital
to an unprecedented extent but we've simultaneously degraded nature
in an unprecedented way.
We have to think of ourselves as asset managers, individuals
businesses, governments, international organisations:
They're all asset managers.
Collectively, however
We've failed to manage the global portfolio of our assets sustainably.
Biodiversity provides nature, or ecosystems if you like, the components of nature, with resilience, health.
A bit like diversity of assets in a portfolio of assets provides the portfolio with stability.
So if you reduce biodiversity, we suffer because nature becomes less resilient.
We need to keep three transformative changes in mind that are now needed. First, we need to
close the gap between the demands we make on nature and nature's ability to supply.
And at the same time, increase nature's ability to supply them.
Second transition:
We need to change the way we think, act and measure economic success.
Move away from GDP or Gross Domestic Product
which does not recognise the depreciation or degradation of nature.
To a measure which is like a balance sheet.
The wealth or the assets that we hand over to our descendants,
that should be the key with which we judge whether we are doing things well.
And thirdly, we need to transform our institutions.
Such as our financial institutions and our education system in such a way as to
align the incentives we face with those actions that further the common good.
The problems we face today are no different from those that our ancestors faced, the difference
really is in quantity. Our distant ancestors were small in number, they did not have an impact
on the biosphere as a whole.
We do
And we are inflicting enormous damage to the biosphere today.
There are success stories from all over the world of what is possible
but we need to enlarge these successes into one grand success.
And that still eludes us.
The same ingenuity that has made such a seeming success of our lives, at the cost of nature, perhaps
can now be redirected in such a way that our lives are enhanced even while nature is enhanced.
At its core the problem is to find a balance between what we take from nature
and what we leave behind for our descendants.
Perhaps we can even do this in a short time.
We and our descendants deserve nothing less.