Beccy Speight, RSPB Chief Executive, said:
This Treasury-commissioned review is an incredibly important moment that should trigger a sea-change in attitude towards the positive role nature plays underpinning our prosperity. The review demonstrates how our economies, livelihoods and well-being fundamentally depend on protecting and enhancing nature. But right now, we aren’t protecting our precious natural wealth and assets.
As we look ahead to recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic we should refocus our efforts towards a genuinely green renewal. To help revive our world, all four governments of the UK must match attitude with action; investing in nature’s recovery and putting it at the heart of all economic decisions. It is no longer acceptable for our environment to be the afterthought.
Link to the full Dasgupta report – click here.
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Is this more taxpayers money spent on an expensive review that the government will ignore because of vested interest?
Cynical moi?
Well many have been here before and been ignored. We don’t even need to go back to Carson. We have had Mary Colwell and others calling for nature to be part of the curriculum. We have had Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics explaining how to replace GDP. Edward Barbier’s The Water Paradox explaining what happens if we refuse to change (still, that’s them over there!).
Dieter Helm’s Green and Prosperous Land and his recent Net Zero give us pointers to the future that we ignore at our peril. On pricing carbon he repeatedly says that it is better to get it roughly right than ignore a difficult subject and get it completely wrong.
What did our politicians not understand about Attenborough’s Blue Planet and Our Perfect Planet. Wilfully deaf dumb and blind!
The 25 year plan allows for kicking the can down the road. Net zero by 2050 means someone else can worry about it in the future. Continuing to subsidise fossil fuels when that money could be used for renewables is plainly bizarre. As is continuing to subsidise farming practices that allow the poisoning of our land our water our health.
There are governments that are actively encouraging population growth whilst putting up barriers to immigration. And we are headed to 8-10 billion!
Paris was a nice place to gather with your mates, jabber a bit, sign something meaningless and carry on as normal. As will be Glasgow.
For COP read cop out.
Yesterday we heard reactions, some incredibly weak, about burning our uplands so a few, very few, could get their kicks killing stuff.
We wanted a container to put precious water in, they gave us a colander.
In a world of rich landowners, the NFU, corporate interests, offshore trusts and expert lobbyists, what is Dasgupta going to change?
Many times I hear experts tell us that technology alone cannot save us. Well it better had because it’s all we’ve got. Our politicians are simply not interested or not intelligent enough to deal with it.
Tony Seba better be right.
Well done you for mentioning the lunacy of some countries pushing up their birth rates (Orban’s Hungary is near fascist) when the total population on this wee planet is already astronomical. Tribalism with a flag wins yet again. Nobody had to wait for this report to go out there to tell the world wasting 40% of the food we produce is disgusting and can’t go on. Kerbside recycling schemes are practically ubiquitous, but how many are fostering the public support they need by telling their ‘constituents’ the terrible damage that’s being done to wildlife and often people too by not practicing reduce, reuse, recycle? If you’re lucky you’ll get info about what day which bin goes out. We’ve had a potentially phenomenal infrastructure in virtually every town, village and city upon which to build environmental education for the entire populace, to develop green initiatives and business for getting on for thirty years now and it’s been wasted. Most recycling projects can’t even tell people why they should recycle.
https://greenfinanceobservatory.org/2021/05/26/the-dasgupta-review-deconstructed/
“What makes this report particularly important is that it is set to define UK policy for the decades to come. The review is also important since, while being ostensibly about biodiversity, it proposes to expand financialization not only to nature but beyond, to human life and everything else.
The overarching goal of policymaking according to the Review is deemed to be maximising ‘inclusive wealth’, defined as the sum of produced capital, human capital and natural capital, and considered to be equivalent to intergenerational well-being.
Rather than challenging the current status quo and providing solutions to address critical biodiversity loss and the 6th mass extinction of species, this Review can be understood as providing the social licence for growth maximisation to continue, thanks to new natural & human capital side constraints.
Biodiversity conservation is compared to asset management, and biodiversity loss is presented as a problem of asset allocation. We will show why this analogy is both inappropriate and dangerous.
We find the political vision promoted in the review to be concerning, from an environmental, social and democratic perspective, all the more than New Zealand and China are also in the process of setting up similar policies, and private lobbies are currently pushing hard to introduce similar policies at EU level.”
Green Finance Observatory. Discuss.