The world’s fisheries are worth $80–100 billion. They are the main or only source of animal protein for about one billion people and the process of catching them employs about 27 million people worldwide. In 2002 fish catches peaked and it is estimated that today around 70 per cent of fish stocks are being fished unsustainably. Industrial marine fishing has already reduced the total mass of large predatory fish, such as tuna and cod, to only 10 per cent of what it was forty or fifty years ago. And it is not only albatross populations that suffer as a consequence. Dolphins, sea turtles and habitats like coral reefs are all at risk from over-fishing. Sea beds across the world have been smashed up by bottom-trawling gear. Again, I have had the opportunity to speak with many experts on this subject, and they warn of impending disaster.
Even in the case of freshwater fisheries, which tend to be under better regulatory control, there is serious cause for concern. Pressures range from pollution to climate change and the way water is impounded using dams and diverted from rivers to irrigate farmland. And it is not only fisheries that are at risk from how we use and manage fresh water.
In 2006 I was struck by the findings of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report on the way water is managed. This highlighted the disturbing fact that ancient, local, traditional approaches to water-harvesting are being rapidly abandoned as countries attempt to centralize and industrialize water resources. It described how, in many countries where new technology and new ideas are embraced in the rush towards modernization, the personal responsibility that individuals and entire communities once felt for maintaining their own water supply is also disappearing. This is interesting. It follows the general trend in modern thinking where rights become more important than responsibility. In the light of the failure of many large-scale modern attempts to centralize water management the report urged countries to think more about encouraging people to recognize their responsibility and to reinvigorate traditional approaches.
There are plenty of other examples of what I see as flaws in our appreciation of our fundamental economic reliance on Nature, and I have seen how these are repeatedly highlighted by scientific bodies, as well as an increasing number of economists and governments. International treaties to protect species and ecosystems have been agreed. National laws have been passed and some companies have begun to look at their supply chains, so as to better understand their reliance on natural systems. All this is very positive, yet tangible benefits for ecosystems are in many cases yet to be seen, at least on the trend-reversing scale needed. Part of the challenge lies in how we have conceived our economic system and how so-called ‘market failures’ can lead to devastating impacts on Nature that in turn harm the economy.
In recent years researchers have begun to look at the scale of this economic flaw and have reached some quite amazing conclusions. One study that made a big impression on me was completed in 1997. It was an investigation which set out to estimate how much, in financial terms, Nature is worth to us by calculating the cost of replacing the services it provides – if we possibly could. The seminal paper in question was produced by a research team led by Robert Costanza and was published in the leading journal Nature. It was called ‘the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital’, and summarized research that set out to estimate the value of a wide range of ecosystem services, including wetlands and how they protect property from flooding, the insects that pollinate crops, the benefits provided by rain, and natural regeneration of soils – among a range of other services. The figure they arrived at suggested the annual value of Nature in bald, bottomline financial terms was then about $33 trillion. This, they said, was a minimum estimate.
Honey bee pollinating flowers. These insects are not only a vital component in complex ecosystems, but also a vital part of the human economy. One recent study suggests that the retail value of agricultural products produced in the UK with the help of honey bees pollinating flowers is about ®1 billion per year. In parts of China where honey bees have disappeared farmers must pollinate fruit tree flowers by hand with feather dusters.
What is perhaps more significant about this finding is how that figure was getting on for double global GDP at the time ($18 trillion). In other words, according to this calculation, the part of the economy that we measure, desperately try to grow and obsess about day after day in the Media is only about half as valuable financially as the part upon which we place almost no financial value at all andgive little attention to, and yet which is the ultimate source of all our wealth! The term ‘market failure’ hardly does justice to the scale and profundity of this oversight, but that is what it is: an economic failure of epic proportions.
Shanghai, China. A modern example of rapid economic growth. Following the historic pattern of development of many Western countries, China, India, Brazil and others are embarked on development programmes which demand vast supplies of energy, water, land and other natural resources.
Other studies only serve to clarify this state of affairs. One, begun in 2008 by the United Nations and called the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Study, or TEEB, which continues to do its work, sought to highlight the growing cost in financial terms of the annual loss of biodiversity and the destruction of ecosystems around the world. They began by working out the value of the natural systems wiped out every year, be it wetlands or rainforest and so on. If you imagine this area as a factory, they estimated that this factory would be worth around $50 billion. But that is not the total loss. The figures are worse than that. Calculating the annual output lost from this $50 billion economic concern over a period of the next forty years and applying a low rate of interest to that output, their estimate was that, in financial terms, the world’s economy is incurring a loss of between $2 and $4.5 trillion every year because of our destruction – every single year. To put that figure into perspective, when the world’s banking system suffered its crash recently – described by the Media frenzy as ‘the worst financial crisis the world has seen since the 1930s’ – the estimated one-off loss of that crisis was put at just $2 trillion. We all witnessed the scale of that news story, but it is curious that the far bigger one has never yet received the same sort of panicked Media attention.
This leads me to suggest that the increasingly unbalanced relationships we forge with the world around us are of far more importance than is widely understood. Harmony between people and the rest of Nature is not simply a philosophical or ethical matter – it is a fundamental practical and economic priority. But it is not seen this way because of the way we have come to measure and consider economic progress.
During the twentieth century, and particularly in the period after the Second World War, countries began to measure something called Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. This is basically a proxy for how much economic activity is taking place in a country and is a measure of the output of goods and services. Once it became possible to measure GDP with some accuracy (and also Gross National Product, or GNP, the measure of income rather than output), it was a natural and short step to measuring ‘growth’ – the increase year on year of GDP or GNP. This proved a very convenient tool for assessing a country’s success, not least because it gave the impression of being a good benchmark for social welfare and national progress.
I grew up in this era and have seen the vast changes that have occurred in society as a result of what has become our obsession with endless economic expansion. I can see that measuring growth in this way is the logical outcome of two and a half centuries of industrial development in the West. It is, after all, a means of computing our continued and accelerating ability to improve human progress by harnessing technology and pushing the boundaries of science. What is perhaps less well known is that those who came up with the idea of measuring GDP growth cautioned against using it in this way, simply because this is not what it was designed for. Economists such as Simon Kuznets, who helped to establish ways of measuring GDP, warned that there was a lot more that it didn’t
