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FOR a government-backed report, the recently published Dasgupta Review on the economics of biodiversity, commissioned by the UK Treasury in 2019, is blunt in its critique of mainstream economic thinking. “We may have increasingly queried the absence of Nature from official conceptions of economic possibilities, but the worry has been left for Sundays,” the distinguished University of Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta writes in his preface. “On week-days, our thinking has remained as usual.”

The naturalist David Attenborough is still blunter about the consequences in the report’s foreword. “We are facing a global crisis. We are totally dependent upon the natural world. It supplies us with every oxygen-laden breath we take and every mouthful of food we eat. Yet we are currently damaging it so profoundly that many of its natural systems are now on the verge of breakdown.”

Our understanding of the web of dependencies that link us to the natural world is perhaps 30 or 40 years behind the science of climate change. But we know enough to declare our assault on Earth’s biodiversity and natural ecosystems a crisis of similar magnitude – one that no government, company or individual can now afford to ignore.

“Clean water and air, fertile soils and reduced risk of disease aren’t ‘nice-to-have’ fripperies”

This special issue on the state of the natural world and how we can restore it appears in this context (see Rescue plan for nature: How to fix the biodiversity crisis). It is the first of a series of features on biodiversity, produced in association with the United Nations Environment Programme, that will appear over the coming weeks. It reflects a renewed focus on all aspects of our environmental impact as the world seeks to build back better from the covid-19 pandemic.

This crisis has been a wake-up call that human health and wealth are dependent on the health of the ecosystems around us. Clean water and air, fertile soils, reduced risk of diseases jumping from animals to us, and all the other “ecosystem services” that a healthy natural world gives us for free aren’t “nice-to-have” fripperies. For all our sakes, we must work to resolve the crisis we have precipitated – every day of the week.