Perhaps naively, I thought both worth taking seriously. I am an economist, not a scientist, and what interests me is the allocation of scarce resources. That is what economics is all about – making the best of what we have, and investing in the best possibilities to improve our lot. While humans have so far got by very well by pitting progress against nature, and especially in agriculture, this does not seem to me a good option going forward. The damage has gone too far, and our prosperity is likely to be compromised if we go on as we are. Put negatively, the environmental damage is going to make us all poorer. Put positively, we can be much better off if we protect and enhance our environment. It is not nature versus the economy; it is investing in nature to increase prosperity. My grandfather’s farm might not have turned out to be so ‘uneconomic’ as was easily assumed in an agricultural context riven with perverse (uneconomic) subsidies.
This is beginning to be understood on the global stage, even if little is being done to address the problems. The climate change penny has dropped, and people are beginning to understand that the mass extinction under way is unlikely to have a happy ending for us. At the local level, the challenges of mental health, of obesity, and of the loss of beauty and wonder in our lives are getting more bandwidth. Added to this broad dawning of understanding, there are lots of specific costs to the pollution we are continuing to cause. Plastics are now headline news. Water companies have reached the end of the treatment road and recognise that it is cheaper to pay farmers not to pollute. The loss of soil is leaving farmers exposed. Poor air quality carries on killing people. None of this makes much sense even on narrow economic grounds.
Perhaps even more encouraging is the recognition that nature has value in itself, and not just for the ways in which it indirectly underpins our economy. Nature is the main organised interest in this country, way beyond football and trade unions. There are literally millions of members of nature organisations. Enjoying the great outdoors is the main leisure activity, whether it be a walk in the park or along the canal or riverbank, or visiting a National Park. People like nature and they care about it. They have what E. O. Wilson called ‘biophilia’.[4] The BBC series Blue Planet II was watched by 17 million people in the UK. Gardening, that intimate engagement with plants and wildlife close up, is a national obsession. All of this great energy and enthusiasm can be harnessed to protect and enhance our natural capital.
Upon its creation as an independent advisory committee to the government, the NCC set about two main tasks: first, defining what natural capital is, identifying which bits matter most, and creating a conceptual framework around science and accounting; and second, putting the overarching generational objective into a practical and deliverable framework. Against the odds, and in the face of much scepticism from environmentalists, we did this.
The NCC has already achieved a great deal. It established natural capital as the way of thinking about our natural environment, as a hard and rigorous concept, and not simply another slogan that can mean anything to anyone according to their vested interests. Crucially, the NCC proposed a 25 Year Environment Plan, and this has now been published, with broad political support.[5] It remains to be seen whether it is fully implemented. But the signs are encouraging. Legislation is coming.
In the early years of the NCC I wrote Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet to provide an accessible account of what the concept means, how to measure it, and the broad policy implications that follow.[6] Now we have the 25 Year Environment Plan, I want to set out the prize that this could offer, and what the environment could look like mid-century. Most of all I want to show why this is in our economic interests, why it will enhance our prosperity, why we can be green and more prosperous at the same time, and why we don’t have to accept as inevitable a world without our insects, our birds, our wild flowers and fungi, and our mammals, reptiles and aquatic life. We don’t have to have the poverty of a silent spring and of monotone landscapes.
That is what this book is all about. It is deliberately broad in scope and content, providing a framework and illustrating what sort of outcomes there might be, and most importantly showing how we can not only deliver on all these individual projects, but also how they can be combined in a great national effort. Most of the examples are already well known to naturalists and ecologists. Many very good people have come up with myriad plans for their own patches. The aim here is to think big, to think about Britain as a whole, and to consider how it can be made to work better for the next generation. I make no pretence of having the scientific expertise to fill in the details – that is for others much better qualified than me. What I do lay claim to is showing how this all works economically and how to implement it.
There are those who decry economic approaches to the environment; who claim that they overlook the beauty and spiritual values and intrinsic nature. They make a good point when the target is a narrow and crude cost–benefit analysis. But they are wrong in two key ways: prosperity is a broad, not a narrow, concept; and the value to people of nature and all its beauty is every bit as important as the health benefits of clean water. The conventional metric of economic success, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is a pathetically poor measure of what we get out of nature; and if conservation and enhancing the environment does not make economic sense then the evidence from the last two centuries at least is that it will be neglected. Sadly, appealing to intrinsic nature and spiritual values has not worked so far.
AI, artificial intelligence
AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
BBOWT, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust
BEIS, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy
CAP, Common Agricultural Policy
CFP, Common Fisheries Policy
CLA, Country Land and Business Association
DDT, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
DEFRA, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
EEC, European Economic Community
ELMS, Environmental Land Management Scheme
ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance
GDP, Gross Domestic Product
GM, genetically modified
GPS, global positioning system
HS2, a planned high-speed railway project
NCC, Natural Capital Committee
NFU, National Farmers’ Union
NGO, non-governmental organisation
NRA, National Rivers Authority
OEP, Office for Environmental Protection
OFWAT, Water Services Regulation Authority
ONS, Office for National Statistics
RSPB, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
SEPA, Scottish Environment Protection Agency
SSSI, Site of Special Scientific Interest
TB, tuberculosis
OUR NATURAL CAPITAL INHERITANCE
Britain’s natural environment is shaped by its past and its biodiversity. Few locations on the planet have had such a turbulent past visibly carved into the landscape. In the Hebrides, some of the oldest rock formations on the planet, dating back 3 billion years, have broken