The View | For how the global economy needs biodiversity, look no further than your pint of beer
- The natural world supports much of our economic activity, generating trillions of dollars, yet natural resources are too often treated as valueless
- Factoring environmental dependency and impact into all business decisions will go a long way to ensure biodiversity is protected
Drinking a pint in a pub may not feel like a nature-dependent activity, but it is. Like countless other consumer purchases, from clothing to mobile phones, many of the inputs that brewers need to make beer derive from the natural world.
In fact, the market economy can be thought of as a system of creating wealth from applying human ingenuity to the gifts that nature provides us. We harvest the bounties of nature, and bring them to market to trade for a profit.
As technology and other processes have made the wealth-creating process more efficient, they have also increased the apparent distance between the economy and the environment. But dig deep enough into any value chain and eventually you end up where we started: transforming environmental resources into states that facilitate human consumption.
In fact, biodiversity – the variety of life on earth – underpins the economy to a scale of US$44 trillion, according to the World Economic Forum. Numbers this large tend to be hard to relate to, but this is not meant as a hypothetical. It is a measure of economic activity equivalent to around half of the global economy. Broaden the definition of “value”, and the real number may be even larger.
This understanding of biodiversity as a fundamental component of wealth creation is driving a rapid awakening in business’ attitudes and activities in response to biodiversity loss, and it’s not just sectors that are more obviously reliant on the environment, such as agriculture or tourism, but businesses in almost every sector via their extended value chains.