Free The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding

review and compilation, the team of scientists and economists who produced the report estimated that the total value of ecosystem services was between $16 trillion and $54 trillion annually, with an average of $33 trillion. They noted the uncertainties but took a conservative approach and stressed that “this must be considered a minimum estimate.” Versus this figure, they noted that total global gross national product (GNP) in 1997 was around half that at $18 trillion. Recent work done by the TEEB project, led by Deutsche Bank’s Pavan Sukhdev, provides valuable tools that business and policy makers can use to integrate this way of thinking into their work. While different studies will produce different numbers and details, the core conclusions are always the same. What we get from nature is fundamental to our economy, and without these inputs we would in fact produce nothing. Yet most political debates are still framed in the context of environmental protection being “nice to have” if we can afford it.
    What all this means is we have clearly moved beyond needing to protect what environmentalists call “charismatic megafauna” like polar bears and pandas. We are now firmly in the space of needing to protect rather less charismatic creatures, like you and me. Let there be no doubt that if the environment crashes, the economy will go with it.
    So while it is clear that environmental damage leads to economic loss, how certain are we of the underlying assessment of the environmental damage? Good science, like good business strategy, requires us to check our conclusions against other sources. In scientific language, we need multiple independent lines of evidence. In the case of the global sustainability challenge, we are fortunate to have a plethora of them.
    One of the more famous, because it provides such a beautifully simple way to communicate a complex problem, is the work of the Global Footprint Network. 16 This group of scientists, under the supervision of an eminent global advisory board, takes the complexity of the various ecological services such as those detailed in the MEA and translates them into the area of the earth’s surface needed to sustain them. To quote from their report, they take “5,400 data points for each country, each year, derived from internationally recognized sources to determine the area required to produce the biological resources a country uses and to absorb its wastes, and to compare this with the area available.”
    In other words, they work out how much land we would need to support our economy and lifestyle and then compare that with how much suitable land we have available to do so. By analyzing this globally, they show us how many “planets” we need to sustain our current economy—either how much more we can still grow the economy if the answer is less than one planet, or how far past sustainable capacity we are if the answer is more than one. The answer on a global scale is that in 2009, we needed 140 percent of the available land, or 1.4 planets. 17 It was just 1986 when we first went past the earth’s capacity, and we’ve been exceeding this capacity ever since. This means we are using up our capital every day now just to survive.
    It is often easier to understand the implications of this by thinking about it in terms of personal finance or of running a business.
    Suppose you ran your life or your company with all your money coming from two bank accounts, one with the capital—the amount you start with—and one with income—the interest you earn from your capital. You can’t obtain any more capital except by transferring it back from your interest account. For humanity, the earth is our capital: We can’t create any more planet.
    Each year on January 1, the interest you have earned on your capital balance is transferred into your income account, representing in our comparison all the services we take from