From the opening of The Case for Nature.
To our right, just across the monsoonal river, lay a forest of sal trees, the constant hum of the cicadas in the undergrowth punctuated only by the escalating call of an Indian cuckoo. Just minutes away from where we now stood, we had sighted the area’s newly dominant male tiger, Neela Nala, marking his territory as he strutted across a clearing, chital deer scattering in his wake.
On the near side of the river was a different landscape altogether: field after field of paddy, dotted with the colourful mud-and-terracotta houses typical of the Gond and Baiga tribal communities. By contrast, the tractors and shiny motorcycles parked around the place represented the recent, if still modest, prosperity of much of rural India.
A few decades ago, the two vistas might have been indistinguishable. By the time I visited, the difference was night and day. The ‘core’ zone of the celebrated Kanha national park, across the river, had remained largely pristine, supporting a rebound in tiger populations as poaching pressures within the park eased.
The challenge lay in the so-called ‘buffer’ zone to our left. The legacy of relocations of tribal villages out of the park, combined with India’s recent economic growth, had seen rice paddies and roads displace what had once been a thickly forested corridor to tiger reserves further afield. A previously vast, interconnected natural ecosystem across the Central Indian Highlands was becoming little more than a set of scattered wildlife refuges in a landscape increasingly defined by human influence.
A week later, I encountered a similar scene in central Indonesia. Emerging from the ocean after a series of exhilarating drift-dives among manta rays and sharks in Komodo National Park, I came across the sorry sight of a five-foot-long dragon stepping gingerly over the bottle caps and plastic bags that washed up daily on the shores of Komodo island. Seen from above, the verdant, protected islands of the Sape Strait make a striking contrast with the boomtown of Labuan Bajo, where concrete radiates out from what had just years ago been the richly forested western tip of Flores.
Both Kanha and Komodo, success stories of an early wave of twentieth-century environmentalism, are exemplars of fortress-style conservation, a philosophy that seeks to define protected areas, protect them actively, and typically rid them of human influence. But both are now bumping up against the limits of what fortress conservation can achieve, surrounded as they are by growing economic pressures. Built infrastructure, agriculture, timber harvesting and pollution of all sorts are chipping away at their broader ecosystems, even as the core sites remain well protected. Against the backdrop of an escalating climate crisis, they risk being overlooked amid a well-intentioned global shift in focus to tackling greenhouse gas emissions. But the biodiversity crisis we are plunging into is just as perilous and urgent, for everyone on the planet. India and Indonesia are not alone in their struggle to balance economic development and conservation, to find ways to make space for nature while doing right by their people.
It was with places such as these in mind, with their complex local dynamics and competing priorities, that I set out to write this book and make the case for nature: a case that appeals to both the head and the heart, and that offers a radical, hopeful and pragmatic path forward to regenerate our planet and revive our economies and societies along the way.
Central to the case I want to make are a set of ideas and recent developments that are grounded in the notion of ‘natural capital’. The baseline of this approach is that, in and of itself, the natural world is priceless, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have value. We are all familiar with the concepts of financial capital, human capital and social capital. Natural capital is simply a framework that can allow us to recognise a sliver of the value that we derive from the natural world: the ways in which our natural assets, like forests and oceans, can provide a range of ecosystem services that represent economic and social goods. These services range from tangible ones like clean air and water, carbon storage, fertile soils and pollination, to the intangible cultural and spiritual value that complements them. If we are to meet the imperative to protect and restore our planet, we can no longer treat nature as a distant wonder to be enjoyed on occasion before we retreat once again to modernity: natural capital fundamentally underpins our wellbeing and deserves a central place in our economic framework.
In an economy roiled by crisis after crisis, it can feel at times like the only option we have is to rip up our current system and start over again, embracing degrowth or dramatically curtailing the market economy. But the ‘market’ is a social construct, and one that has largely been governed with a narrow set of financial aims in mind. With time running out, I argue that we need to make a serious effort to fold nature’s value into the system we already have: one that has, to its credit, brought remarkable progress and improved living standards for many, but has clearly gone too far in the direction of environmental destruction.
If net-zero carbon emissions is what we’re aiming for in the climate fight, this book lays out some ways in which we can also shift to a ‘nature-positive’ economy: one that reverses biodiversity loss globally and begins restoring ecosystems and the communities that steward them. There is nothing incremental about this vision. We made this economy; now we can remake it.
We made this economy; now we can remake it.
We can begin simply by viewing nature differently. I hope the ideas in this book will lead you, like me, to believe that protecting and restoring nature is firmly in our economic interests, but also the right thing to do on moral and spiritual grounds; that nature needs to be bound closely to our societies, taking a cue from a range of indigenous worldviews, rather than set apart in fortresses.
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While this book is focused on what and how we can gain, not on what we have already lost, the basic facts of ecosystem collapse are undeniable. From the global exchange of species carried on our ships to the 375 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere, we have bent the planet to our will and irrevocably changed it in the process. On land and in the sea, biodiversity is crashing as we continue to expand, extract, export and emit. We have driven the loss of a third of global forests and, with them, an ark’s worth of species. From the dodo to the Formosan clouded leopard, much of the world’s displaced flora and fauna can now be found only in cabinets of curiosities. And this is to say nothing of the many species which remain on the grim parade towards extinction, from orangutans and black rhinos to the Asiatic lion and the Yangtze River dolphin. Our natural world is tamer than it has ever been: 96 per cent of mammal biomass on our planet is now accounted for by us and our livestock, a number that barely rose above 2 per cent for the first 5,000 or so years of human civilisation. Industrial fishing has enabled us to pillage the seas, causing unprecedented reductions to once-populous species; nearly 90 per cent of global fish stocks are overexploited or depleted. Even in the benthos, the deepest seas about which we know less than we do about the moon, the effects of humanity can be felt as trawler nets drag across the sea floors. Though we have understood the dangers for a long time, agricultural runoff, industrial waste and oil spills continue to pour into our seas and waterways, causing mass die-offs and the accumulation of toxic compounds. Plastic pollution, too, finds its way into the oceans and a gyre of plastic waste three times the size of France now churns in the Pacific, entangling and poisoning sea life. Never before has Earth’s biosphere been so disproportionately impacted by a single species.
All of this has taken place against the backdrop of a rapidly changing and warming climate. Recent years have been the hottest in recorded history, with global temperatures now running around 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels. Unprecedented wildfires have burned vast areas of California, Australia, Indonesia, Europe and even Siberia; powerful storms have wreaked havoc in the Caribbean and the Indo-Pacific alike. Pakistan has suffered the worst flooding in its history even as drought has taken hold in China and famine has stalked the horn of Africa. None of this should be news to even the most casual follower of world events, but few put it as starkly as David Wallace-Wells in his book The Uninhabitable Earth.
Countering the notion that we’ve entered a ‘new normal’, he writes, ‘the truth is actually much scarier […] That is, the end of normal, never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place […] the climate system that raised us, and raised everything we know as human culture and civilisation, is now, like a parent, dead.’ It is hard to fault Wallace-Wells for being doom-and-gloom. His basic point is spot on; it is, indeed, what climate models suggest about where we find ourselves today.
‘This is the warmest summer of your life, and the coldest summer of the rest of your life,’ declares one widely shared meme. Dark humour might be a fair last resort in times like these, but I believe there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, even if the odds remain long. On climate change, the years since the Paris Climate Accords in 2015 have been marked by a series of important tonal and tangible shifts in the way governments and businesses are approaching the carbon challenge. Dozens of governments have committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 or thereabouts: a commitment that includes deep cuts to emissions (turning off the tap), and the scaling up of natural and engineered carbon removal (the draining of the atmospheric bathtub). Current policies put us on track for around 2.7 degrees of warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century: still catastrophic, but far lower than the 4 degrees that looked all but certain before Paris. That alone is grounds for hope, as Wallace-Wells himself points out: a four- or six-degree-heated world would be unimaginably worse than a two-and-something-degree heated world in terms of the sheer extent of societal collapse that it would bring about.
To be sure, we need to work ever-harder to limit warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees, and we seem to take backward steps all the time, from the energy-market fallout of the Ukraine invasion to the election of climate deniers and free-market fundamentalists to high office. But, at the very least, our steps forward on carbon cutting are belatedly gathering pace.
The same cannot, unfortunately, be said of the biodiversity crisis. For all the attention that the annual climate conference of parties (COP) meetings, such as the ones in Paris in 2015 or Glasgow in 2021, receive, few people realise that a parallel set of biodiversity COPs has been limping along for decades. The last meeting, due to be held in Kunming in China in 2020, was postponed twice; it felt like hardly anyone noticed. Behind these divergent fates lies a shared origin story: both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity were conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, billed back then as the conference to save the world.
Three decades on, there is still the need for greater recognition that the biodiversity and climate crises are deeply intertwined. Tackling climate change simply cannot be done without tackling the agriculture and deforestation that currently account for a fifth of global emissions, and restoring the natural sinks (forests, wetlands, peatlands and the like) that can reverse warming by drawing down billions of tonnes of carbon. Climate change, in turn, is speeding up the collapse of the Earth’s biodiversity as species everywhere struggle to adapt.
But the decarbonisation agenda has pulled steadily ahead of the biodiversity agenda in the years since Rio as businesses and governments have slowly but surely begun setting net-zero targets, investing in renewables and taking bold bets on new climate-related technologies. I take heart from the scores of peers now pivoting into careers focused on tackling the climate crisis. Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and arguably the world’s foremost climate negotiator who led years of diplomacy that culminated in the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, acknowledged in an interview with me that she had seen a dramatic rise in climate-related careers in her two-plus decades working on the challenge. ‘I used to know everybody who was working on climate, I definitely don’t anymore,’ she told me. ‘And that’s a wonderful thing.… With each new generation that comes in you get new skills, new viewpoints, new capacity to engage with such a complex issue. I’m delighted that there are so many new people in climate, and especially so many young people.’
But I chose to focus this book on nature in part because I noticed that those around me, the current or soon-to-be leaders in their respective fields of business, technology or policy, were finally waking up to the energy-climate challenge while often remaining in the dark about the extent and importance of the biodiversity crisis. This was never for a lack of interest; if climate change is now the stuff of careers, nature remains the realm of our truest passions. When I talked of my own love for nature, my peers and colleagues would reliably light up. ‘I love nature too.… I had an amazing time in [insert choice of national park, forest or reef]’ I’d hear, over and over again. We’d exchange notes about dives and hikes; we’d speak of the peace that a walk through a green space always brings.
This is, in my mind, the largely positive legacy of the nature conservation movement, which has inspired successive generations to look upon nature with wonderment and benevolence. This movement, exemplified by the creation of national parks like Kanha and Komodo across the world throughout the 1900s (though often to the violent exclusion of indigenous peoples, a theme we will return to) and the successful protection of a handful of charismatic species, has indeed achieved remarkable tactical gains. Human beings’ irrepressible love for the natural world has been channelled into a powerful and primarily ethical argument for preservation. The logic, to put it in deliberately reductive terms, is clear and superficially compelling: we should set aside areas for plants and animals to thrive, and for us to visit and marvel at, even as we continue hurtling towards modernity in our own economies and societies.
No wonder, then, that in many of these conversations nature was spoken of as separate from the modern, typically urban, life of Homo economicus. When I broached the idea that it might also make hard-nosed, practical sense to value and invest in nature, I’d usually get puzzled looks from the same people who had, by now, made the link between an escalating climate crisis and its direct and all-too-real threats to our economies and societies. People who had become firmly convinced that climate action was in our economic, perhaps even selfish, interests. It was arguments like these that had led to a cascade of new net-zero commitments, and the accompanying billions in investments, in the years since Rio and Paris.
In each of those conversations, I learnt something of our collective failure to communicate the urgency of this ‘other’ crisis, to pluck nature from the realm of the nice-to-haves and place it firmly within the universe of existential questions. To build on the work of the first wave of environmental concern, it has become increasingly clear to me that we have to make a broader and deeper case for nature; to elevate natural capital, alongside its similarly overlooked cousin, human capital, to equal prominence with the financial capital we know all too well.
‘With energy, we have compelling business models that have been developed over several years.… There is market logic to it now, with a profitable business model,’ Figueres explained. ‘The problem with nature-based solutions, as opposed to energy-based solutions, is that there is no business model because we have not yet agreed on a valuation for walking carbon or flying carbon or swimming carbon or growing carbon.’
This success we have had in framing the climate challenge in economic terms is ultimately why this is not a book on the energy-climate challenge. Even as I explore the many links between the climate crisis and the case for nature in the chapters that follow, nature deserves independent treatment in order to illuminate the radical new ways in which flying, growing or swimming life forms are finally being valued. And in the small minority of cases where getting to net-zero emissions and building a nature-positive economy come into conflict, say, in mining minerals in ecologically sensitive areas, or siting transmission lines, I want both sides to get their due so that the trade-offs, where they arise, can be discussed honestly and resolved transparently.
With words that remain as relevant and chilling as they were in 1985, a speaker on the floor issued the following warning at a UN-organised public hearing in the years leading up to Rio. ‘You talk very little about life,’ they said. ‘You talk too much about survival. It is very important to remember that when the possibilities for life are over, the possibilities for survival start. And there are peoples here in Brazil, especially in the Amazon region, who still live […] [who] don’t want to reach down to the level of survival.’
Even if it were possible to geoengineer our way out of a warming planet while overseeing mass extinction in the natural world (which it isn’t), those words remain instructive. For that outcome would offer us only survival, without life. The case for tackling climate change on its own is the case for ensuring human survival; the case for nature is, ultimately, the complementary case for securing a living planet worth living for.
The case for nature is, ultimately, the complementary case for securing a living planet worth living for.
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The declarative nature of this book’s title belies a certain complexity, for there are ultimately several sorts of cases for nature. Scholars far more qualified than I have explored the economic arguments for preserving nature and the notion of ‘natural capital’ for decades; activists and artists have made intrinsic cases for nature for centuries; spiritual traditions have arguably appealed to higher ideals in relation to nature for millennia. But each of these cases have, for too long, been viewed as separate, even as somehow in conflict with each other, when in fact they all form part of a powerful, indivisible case for nature.
Since I began researching this book in 2020, my own thinking has certainly evolved. I started with the assumption that the intrinsic arguments had been made well enough. I judged that they had reached a wide and increasingly receptive audience, a reflection, perhaps, of the environmentally conscious bubble I live and work in. Through hundreds of conversations, including with people who disagreed with me, I changed my mind: I came to view both motivations, economic and intrinsic, as deserving of far more attention.
To lay my own cards on the table: the intrinsic case on its own has always been more than powerful enough for me. I was raised by a family of conservationists in India, steeped in a culture that valued nature and the minimisation of ecological suffering, for its own sake. My grandmother and father spent years volunteering at the Blue Cross, nursing injured animals back to health; my mother later found her own way into conservation through her passion for wildlife photography. In researching this book, I was frequently reminded of the profoundly important and complementary need to cultivate love and respect for nature, and perhaps even a spiritual relationship to the natural world. Others have made that case persuasively through their writing, filmmaking and scholarship.
Having said all that, much of what follows nevertheless focuses on the economic case for nature.
For one, it is by far the less well-understood set of arguments, even in the green-tinged circles that I and perhaps you inhabit. Even as researchers and practitioners have plugged away at understanding the value of nature to human wellbeing for decades, the ideas underlying natural capital have only occasionally made the leap from academia and the NGO world to common parlance. Where they are discussed, as in the recent surge of interest in natural climate solutions, nature’s utility is often viewed narrowly (say, in the planting of trees to draw down our carbon pollution). In pulling together a range of business cases, and describing them in accessible, jargon-light terms, I hope to bring the concept of natural capital to life as an integrated whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I also feel a sense of urgency that I cannot shake. The industrialised world, having pillaged for several centuries, now offers up to present and future generations a dangerously denuded set of landscapes and seascapes. But the task is even more urgent in the developing world: in countries like India and Indonesia, with growing populations that rightfully harbour economic aspirations. It’s all very well to ask wealthy urban consumers to pay a premium for nature-friendly products. It’s another thing entirely to expect the communities that live in, and typically steward, natural landscapes to give up their extractive routes to prosperity without enabling better ones in their place. What a tragedy it would be if they were forced to follow the same path as the West, belatedly atoning for their sins decades hence when tigers and Komodo dragons are but distant memories. If falling crop yields, historic floods and ever-more-frequent wildfires are warning signs these countries cannot choose to ignore, then models for restoration that also happen to make economic sense deserve attention, right now.
But, beyond the relative novelty and absolute urgency of the case for nature, what has made this book all the more enjoyable to write are the new possibilities offered by the technological and financial innovations I have come into contact with during my time as a student, entrepreneur and investor in this space. As we will see, we are now able to monitor ecosystems with incredible precision, creating the trust and transparency that all good markets are built on. We’re refashioning the tools of high finance to channel funding into protection and restoration, rather than destruction. Investing in nature, for financial and social returns, is being made possible by these innovations; not all will achieve scale, but the energy and talent I encountered give me immense hope. This time feels different.
This time feels different.
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The chapters that follow dive into the many exciting ways in which this economic imperative for nature is finally coming to life. We’ll see how the mangrove swamps of Colombia are helping us tackle climate change as we value their carbon services, how Fijian communities are protecting marine life through sustainable ecotourism, how farmers in Britain and elsewhere are demonstrating the ways in which the restoration of soil and ecosystem health can bring food security and assure livelihoods, and how cities across the world are becoming safer, cooler and more liveable by bringing nature in, rather than shutting it out.
In the past, such efforts might have run aground when it came to translating lofty ideals into tangible business models that can measure and value nature’s contributions. Today, we have remarkable tools at our disposal that make this challenge eminently solvable; as well as the theory of natural capital, we’ll also explore the technological and financial enablers that are bringing trust and scale to new environmental markets.
I haven’t attempted to create a comprehensive list of global case studies as a textbook might. I was fortunate to be able to write opportunistically, learning along the way, each interview and field visit leading to more introductions and opportunities. Some chapters, like the one on ecotourism, naturally lent themselves to examination through the lens of (my own) personal experiences. Others, like the chapter on carbon markets, demanded a deeper dive into the scientific and technical details. In each chapter, I try to highlight different sides of the live debates that surround the various approaches and provide my own perspectives on them.
I should also clarify up front that the ‘economic’ or ‘business’ cases I refer to are not the exclusive preserve of businesses; as we will see, governments can and do invest in nature on behalf of their citizens, and typically make the public goods that emerge freely available to them. The point here is not private profit, but economic logic: the driving force that, for better or for worse, animates our economies and societies. In such a world, it remains my firm belief that nature deserves a seat at the financial table if we are to avoid relegating flora and fauna to a shrinking patchwork of protected areas at the fringes of the modern economy: museum pieces, in effect.
But economic logic, as widely applicable as it might be, can only go so far; each case builds on a set of underlying, intrinsic motivations to regenerate our long-suffering planet. Perhaps the chapter that gave me most cause for reflection and learning was the one on indigenous perspectives on nature. Having barely scratched the surface of the deep repository of wisdom that indigenous cultures hold, I began to see how tackling the biodiversity and climate crises would require a reconception of our very relationship with the planet. My research led me to rethink the framing of the entire book because I realised that this spiritual case for nature, rooted in deep time, is an important and egregiously overlooked part of the broader case for nature. I hope dearly that I have done it justice but remain humble about the limits of my own understanding and language, steeped as they are in the Western paradigm.
As you explore the array of cases in this book, I urge you to form and test your own perspectives. You might, for instance, end the journey with more conviction in the back-to-basics potential of regenerative agriculture than in the long-term integrity of carbon markets, more hope in the power of technology than in the promise of financial innovation to enable such shifts. On balance, I have come to believe in the potential of each of them, but I encourage you to treat this as a flavour of all that is out there, to bring a dose of healthy scepticism to everything you read in these pages and elsewhere, to continue exploring these themes through other books, papers and documentaries, and ultimately to make up your own mind. Whatever conclusion you come to, I hope you will leave better informed, more hopeful, and more motivated to make the case for nature in your own way.
I asked Christiana Figueres what lay behind her ‘stubborn optimism’ on our ability to tackle this emergency of our own making. ‘What gives me hope is to see that, despite our stupid actions, we still have incredible resilience in nature. To see that the moment that we remove the pressure from nature, she tends to jump back,’ she said with characteristic flair, reflecting on her native Costa Rica’s journey to reversing deforestation and developing a thriving nature-based tourism economy as its wildlife populations rebounded. ‘It’s pretty amazing because nature could perfectly well have decided a long time ago that we are such idiots, she’s just not going to tolerate us anymore. And the fact that she’s still resilient is incredibly generous.’
Indeed. In the two years I spent researching this book, I found more reasons for optimism than I could possibly have imagined when I first set out. I’m delighted to be able to share them with you. Let’s dive in.