Nature doesn't issue invoices, gives everything free of cost: Environmental economist

Nature gives everything to us free of cost and does not generate invoices and hence it is our responsibility to protect it, says noted international environmental economist Pavan Sukhdev.

"India had enough ‘brain power’ to solve its own problems of wealth inequality, ecological degradation and resultant huge loss of ‘natural capital’," Sukhdev said.

Sukhdev is the founder of GIST Advisory, a specialist consulting firm that helps governments and corporations discover, measure, value, and manage their impacts on natural and human capital.

Giving examples to highlight what an ‘invisible economy’ is, Sukhdev cited the ‘rainfall factories of the planet’ covering the Amazon, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Indonesian archipelago as generating nearly 20 billion tonnes of moisture that evaporate due to the North East trade winds and fall as rain over Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, which in turn produce half the world’s food from this rainfall system. “How much does the granary of Latin America pay for this freshwater? The answer is zero. This is the invisible economics of nature,” explained Sukhdev; “We fail to understand values unless it is in economic terms.”

Closer home, Sukhdev outlined current agriculture, livestock and fishery policy and practice as causing complex environmental damage to both land and sea ecosystems.
“Huge investments in agriculture, he explained, included technology to extract more water from soils, add more chemicals, produce more harvests, that need more transportation, including shipping, that produces carbon emissions, making food the third-largest waster in the world,” he said.

“Global food production is responsible for 56 per cent of total carbon emissions in the world of climate change,” he said.

Sukhdev added that health issues from these large-scale conventional systems were still not sufficiently highlighted, outlining India’s livestock industry using antibiotics leading to antibiotic resistance or herbicides causing a high risk of cancers.

“Not only is it a massive environmental problem, but today’s food system is also a broken system,” said Sukhdev, “We need to protect ourselves, otherwise we are accelerating our own destruction. It is time for people in India to wake up and insist on including natural economics into policy,” he concluded.

Sukhdev works globally with senior government officials, asset managers, and information technology experts to methods to transition themselves to greener, sustainable techniques.