The pioneering economist of biodiversity, author of the eponymous report (https://lnkd.in/eZRkNA_Z), came to London for an evening’s discussion hosted by Prosper and Founders Pledge.
1. We have GDP (gross domestic product) but we should have NDP, or net domestic product, encompassing also the costs of that production, principally to nature. We make errors, he suggests, not in estimation, but in measuring the wrong things.
2. Since the Enlightenment, we humans have been the vainglorious subject, to the exclusion of the context (or to use Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice‘s term, “nestedness”) of the biosphere, which is a necessary condition of our subjectivity.
3. The gap between global demand and supply is currently 1.7. In other words, we would need 1.7 earths to satisfy our demands upon it. We have therefore over-reached, because we neither price nor pay for nature properly. As an example of this, each year sees $10tn in ocean-going trade, with no charges levied for the costs to the seas. Imagine if 5% were levied in ecosystem services; this could pay for protection of the entire Amazon rainforest.
4. We should all go back to Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, a history of cautionary tales on land mismanagement and water supply. (On the latter and for our own times, see the brilliant Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, on the history and folly of water in the American West). Sir Partha has done important work on social capital, showing for instance that the tragedy of the commons is averted by established rules of conduct.
5. Flows are easy to measure and price, stocks are hard. GDP is a flow. It is good at measuring economic activity; bad at measuring wellbeing.
6. Sir Partha co-founded the under-valued journal Environment and Development Economics (https://lnkd.in/exbseb6s).
7. He noted that there is not a single economics department at any major university with an ecologist on the payroll. Why, he asks, are students not protesting about this, as they did on campuses across the West after the 2008-09 financial crisis?
8. From 1995 – 2020, produced capital increased twofold; GDP increased by 25%; natural capital diminished by 40%.
9. AI offers hope of better natural capital accounting in future, and better understanding of the interrelationships between its respective categories.
The latter is something we are expressly working towards at Common, for example in yesterday’s gathering of our three advisory boards (on environment, finance, community) in a joint session enabling exploration of the intersections and symbioses between these three critical challenge / opportunity areas.
He also said that extinction rates are at 100 – 1k times above pre-industrial levels, and that from an economist’s point of view, we should at least conserve these life forms for their “option value”, as in their as yet unforseeable potential.