Biodiversity Offsets Blog

This is the fifth part of a guest post series by Nuno Gas­par de Oliveira who works as con­sul­tant and advi­sor in Esporão, a por­tuguese main wine and olive oil com­pany, in the area of Strate­gic Man­age­ment for sus­tain­abil­ity using ‘Busi­ness Ecosys­tems’ models,

This guest post has pre­vi­ously been pub­lished on LinkedIn. It is the expres­sion of the author’s thoughts and expe­ri­ences and as such is acknowl­edged as a fruit­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­cus­sion on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. If you want to react or clar­ify your own posi­tion (under­pin or dis­prove), please leave a reply below!

On April 20 1939, a woman that would for­ever be asso­ci­ated with the sus­tain­abil­ity rev­o­lu­tion was born in Oslo, Nor­way, Gro Harlem Brundt­land. When she was 10 years old, the fam­ily moved to the United States where her father, a med­ical doc­tor, had been awarded a Rock­e­feller schol­ar­ship. Fol­low­ing his foot­steps, she stud­ied to become a med­ical doc­tor as well and con­cluded a Mas­ter of Pub­lic Health (MPH). So, her first choice of career was nei­ther envi­ron­men­tal­ist nor politi­cian, but polit­i­cal activism was already part of her way of life since very ten­der age, becom­ing a mem­ber of the Nor­we­gian Labour Move­ment in its children’s sec­tion at age seven.

In 1965, after spend­ing a few years in the US, she was back in Oslo to assume the posi­tion of Min­istry of Health, but her enthu­si­asm and active com­mit­ment with well­be­ing pro­vided her with the oppor­tu­nity to be offered the posi­tion of Min­is­ter of the Envi­ron­ment in 1974. Albeit reluc­tant at the begin­ning, her con­vic­tion of the link between health and the envi­ron­ment changed her mind. Her rep­u­ta­tion and deeds gained such recog­ni­tion that, in 1981, she was appointed Prime Min­is­ter for the first time, as the youngest per­son and the first woman ever to hold the office of Prime Min­is­ter in Norway.

But why are we ana­lyz­ing the ven­er­a­ble career of Dr Brunt­land? Well, she’s about to star in our story… Con­tinue read­ing →

This is the third part of a guest post series by Nuno Gas­par de Oliveira who works as con­sul­tant and advi­sor in Esporão, a por­tuguese main wine and olive oil com­pany, in the area of Strate­gic Man­age­ment for sus­tain­abil­ity using ‘Busi­ness Ecosys­tems’ models,

This guest post has pre­vi­ously been pub­lished on LinkedIn. It is the expres­sion of the author’s thoughts and expe­ri­ences and as such is acknowl­edged as a fruit­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­cus­sion on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. If you want to react or clar­ify your own posi­tion (under­pin or dis­prove), please leave a reply below!

In the after­shock of Malthus, Smith and Marx, inter alia, many early XXth cen­tury econ­o­mist and polit­i­cal philoso­phers felt the need to find alter­na­tive sce­nar­ios for human devel­op­ment within the lands capac­ity to fos­ter eco­nomic growth and wel­fare in an increas­ingly pop­u­lated world.

One key con­cept to the acknowl­edge­ment of the impor­tance of nat­ural cap­i­tal for the over­all econ­omy is the notion of ‘exter­nal­i­ties’. The term was coined by the British econ­o­mist Arthur Cecil Pigou in ’The Eco­nom­ics of Wel­fare’ (1920–1925), as an alter­na­tive for com­pen­sat­ing the rebound effects of the eco­nomic activ­i­ties on the social and envi­ron­men­tal sphere:

“Wealth exists only for the ben­e­fit of mankind, it can­not be mea­sured ade­quately in yards, not even as equiv­a­lent to so many ounces of gold; its true mea­sure lies only in the con­tri­bu­tion it makes to human well-being”

Under­stand­ing the con­cept of exter­nal­i­ties is under­stand­ing one huge prob­lem noted by the ‘father of mod­ern ecol­ogy’, Eugene P. Odum. In his land­mark book ‘Fun­da­men­tals of Ecol­ogy’ (1953), Odum men­tioned the enor­mous con­tri­bu­tion of nat­ural cap­i­tal, sup­plied free to human soci­eties by nat­ural ecosys­tems, as being com­monly ignored, in part because of the dif­fi­culty of eval­u­at­ing it in con­ven­tional eco­nomic terms. Accord­ing to him,money flows out of urban areas to pay for energy, goods, and human ser­vices, but nat­ural ecosys­tem ser­vices are not accounted for.

A major break­through was needed. Con­tinue read­ing →

This is the first part of a guest post series by Nuno Gas­par de Oliveira who works as.consultant and advi­sor in Esporão, a por­tuguese main wine and olive oil com­pany, in the area of Strate­gic Man­age­ment for sus­tain­abil­ity using ‘Busi­ness Ecosys­tems’ models,

This guest post has pre­vi­ously been pub­lished on LinkedIn. It is the expres­sion of the author’s thoughts and expe­ri­ences and as such is acknowl­edged as a fruit­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­cus­sion on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. If you want to react or clar­ify your own posi­tion (under­pin or dis­prove), please leave a reply below!

In terms of nowa­days eco­nom­ics way of think­ing, one of the strik­ing fea­tures of mod­ern growth mod­els is their silence about the nat­ural foun­da­tions of eco­nomic pro­duc­tion. Cap­i­tal goods and human labour com­bine to pro­duce com­mod­ity out­put, but no land is required as a site, no mate­ri­als are needed from which to form com­modi­ties, and no energy is required to drive the process of com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion and exchange (e.g., Eng­land, 2000).

But how did this hap­pen? Why is the XXIst cen­tury econ­omy still so detached from its true nat­ural foun­da­tions and so focused on the pure finan­cial out­puts? Were there no warn­ings along the road? Appar­ently, there were aplenty, even since the early times… Con­tinue read­ing →