SHORT INFO: Natural capital and nature conservation champions don’t need to fight

View of Eng­lish graz­ing sheep in countryside

What’s it about in short: Green Alliance’s pol­icy direc­tor, Sue Arm­strong Brown says if the mar­ket pays to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment where it can and con­ser­va­tion inter­venes to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment where it must, is the best chance we have to achieve land­scape scale restora­tion of nat­ural places and systems.

When was it released: Jan­u­ary 25, 2016

By whom: Green Alliance, Sue Arm­strong Brown

More info: http://greenallianceblog.org.uk/2016/01/25/natural-capital-and-nature-conservation-champions-dont-need-to-fight/

Short extract:

The internecine strug­gle between sup­port­ers of nat­ural cap­i­tal and nature con­ser­va­tion con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate the debate about how to restore the declin­ing health of the UK’s nat­ural envi­ron­ment. But what if they’re both right?

Pro­po­nents of the nat­ural cap­i­tal approach claim it’s the way to include the envi­ron­ment in eco­nomic deci­sion mak­ing, and dis­count nature con­ser­va­tion as ‘utopian’. Oppo­nents say it dele­git­imises pro­tect­ing nature sim­ply for nature’s sake, and pro­vides a fig leaf to cover inad­e­quate imple­men­ta­tion of envi­ron­men­tal policies.

Our new report, Nat­ural part­ners: why nature con­ser­va­tion and nat­ural cap­i­tal approaches should work together, pub­lished today, iden­ti­fies the dis­tinc­tive strengths of the two schools of thought and con­cludes they should be complementary.

(…)

A strate­gic com­bi­na­tion
Com­bin­ing nat­ural cap­i­tal and con­ser­va­tion pol­icy approaches could offer the best of both worlds. The strength of the nat­ural cap­i­tal approach is its poten­tial to inter­nalise many of the exter­nal costs of envi­ron­men­tal dam­age into the econ­omy, so that it makes good busi­ness sense to look after the envi­ron­ment and costs you to dam­age it.

The degree of pol­icy devel­op­ment needed to bring this about shouldn’t be under­es­ti­mated, but with every flood event and global cli­mate sum­mit, the rea­sons to do it are get­ting clearer. The strength of the nature con­ser­va­tion approach, to com­ple­ment this, is to cut through the com­plex­i­ties and per­ver­si­ties of com­merce, pro­tect the irre­place­able, no mat­ter what the com­pet­ing demands might be, and to recog­nise that we are all richer for cher­ish­ing nature.

Most of us will instinc­tively pre­fer one of the approaches to pro­tect­ing the nat­ural envi­ron­ment over the other. But align­ing the two approaches, so the mar­ket pays to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment where it can and con­ser­va­tion inter­venes to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment where it must, is the best chance we have to achieve land­scape scale restora­tion of nat­ural places and sys­tems. In the end, nature needs peo­ple, and peo­ple need nature.


Comments

SHORT INFO: Natural capital and nature conservation champions don’t need to fight — 2 Comments

  1. Nature & Nature con­ser­va­tion can hap­pen only if the Nation, any one in the Global sce­nario, are gov­erned by the peo­ple for the people.When democ­racy is mature and when the peo­ple are aware of the con­se­quences of fail­ure of Nature con­ser­va­tion and are also aware of the right way to con­serve and man­age the nat­ural resources for the ben­e­fit of present as well as future gen­er­a­tions, def­i­nitely there is level play­ing ground and con­ser­va­tion will hap­pen. But when the sce­nario is dif­fer­ent it will be only utopia to think that mar­ket forces or govt. in power will be able to do jus­tice to the cause.In the global sce­nario, where other Nations are not able to do jus­tice , in the era of glob­al­i­sa­tion , again the biggest casu­al­ity will be nature and nature con­ser­va­tion in all Nations includ­ing UK.We have to think about ways and means to do jus­tice the cause in the pre­vail­ing scenario.

    • Thanks for your com­ment and the insight that nature con­ser­va­tion and social jus­tice and respon­si­bil­ity are inevitably inter­twined — espe­cially in a glob­al­ized setting.

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