




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 4 (2): 5–12, July 2021 

COMMENTARY 

Making Nature Count: Reflections on the Dasgupta 
Review 

Umesh Srinivasan1 and Kartik Shanker2 

Abstract: Earth’s biodiversity is the ultimate engine of local and global economies 
and compromising the renewability of our natural resources will ultimately halt 
economic growth. Despite this, humankind has continued to exploit natural 
resources such as fisheries and forests at highly unsustainable rates in the pursuit of 
flawed development paradigms and simplistic metrics such as gross domestic 
product (GDP). This has already led to the loss of natural habitats and the decline 
and extinction of species as well as consequences such as an increase in zoonotic 
pandemics. The Economics of Biodiversity, a recent report by Sir Partha Dasgupta, 
addresses how the failure of our current institutions has brought us to where we 
stand and suggests ways by which we may reform our economic thought to 
mitigate the impacts on biodiversity. The report identifies important first steps: 
changing the way we measure economic “success”, ensuring that the renewal of 
natural resources keeps supply higher than demand, and restructuring institutional 
frameworks. These are necessary but potentially insufficient measures—tenure over 
land and water is likely to be crucial in addressing the challenges of the future. 
Preserving ecological integrity to allow biodiversity to persist in the face of climate 
change is essential. 

Keywords: Biodiversity; Ecosystem Services; Governance; Resource Management; 
Sustainability. 

                                                        
1 Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, Third Floor, Biological Sciences Building, Indian 
Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka – 560012; umeshs@iisc.ac.in. 

2 Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, Third Floor, Biological Sciences Building, Indian 
Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Karnataka – 560012; Trustee, Dakshin Foundation, #1818, 
5th Main, 9th Cross, Sahakar Nagar C Block, Bengaluru, Karnataka – 560092; 
kshanker@iisc.ac.in.  

Copyright © Srinivasan and Shanker 2021. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i2.463  

  

 

mailto:umeshs@iisc.ac.in
mailto:kshanker@iisc.ac.in
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v4i2.463


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [6] 

In 2012—a full eight years before the start of the ongoing COVID-19 
crisis—award-winning science writer David Quammen warned us of the 
inevitable occurrence of human pandemics in his book Spillover. The 
research on which this book was based is even older. Indeed, for decades 
now, scientists have been sounding the alarm about the potential impacts of 
the loss and degradation of the natural environment. The increasingly 
intense contact between humans and wildlife, which stems from 
deforestation, agriculture, and livestock rearing, combined with increased 
global connectivity, has created perfect conditions for the spread of deadly 
pandemics. SARS and Ebola pointed to the potential impact of a zoonotic 
disease. But scientists’ warnings fell on deaf ears—governments and 
globalized economies measure success in a currency that fails to capture the 
true cost of humanity’s impact on Earth. We are living through the result 
now. 

COVID-19 is just the most recent and dramatic manifestation of a larger 
malaise, which is the subject of an independent review called The Economics 
of Biodiversity (henceforth TEB) (Dasgupta 2021). TEB is a comprehensive, 
lucid, and frightening exploration of the enormous mismatches in the 
functioning of ecosystems and our current institutions, which are 
structurally incapable of, or unwilling to, acknowledge that Earth’s 
biodiversity, which is the ultimate engine of economic growth, is ultimately 
finite. This has led to where we stand today— governments and markets 
continue to publicize GDP growth and quarterly profits to their citizens 
and shareholders, while the unsustainable extraction of natural resources 
has created a climate catastrophe and hastened the sixth-ever mass 
extinction of biodiversity on our planet. Thankfully, and hearteningly, TEB 
does not descend to the depths of formulating blinkered and counter-
productive exercises that seek to place a monetary value on biodiversity 
(e.g., Alongi 2002). Instead, it provides an empathetic and well laid out 
treatment of how we have arrived at where we are and of the road ahead. 

None of this is new—by their very nature, reviews synthesize existing 
information and point the way forward based on the best evidence at hand. 
And the evidence itself has been clear for over half a century, if not more. 
There is no longer any doubt that a country’s gross domestic product 
(GDP) is an exceptionally poor indicator of economic growth, especially 
sustainable economic growth. There is nothing new about the climate crisis, 
except perhaps its current speed (itself an indictment of our failing 
institutions). In most parts of the world, agricultural practices disregard 
local climate, food is transported with no concern for climate change, and 
meat is produced in the most unsustainable manner possible. It is not as if 
the overexploitation and collapse of many commercial fisheries blindsided 



[7] Umesh Srinivasan and Kartik Shanker 

us without warning; this was expected. It is certainly not a profound insight 
that well-managed landscapes and seascapes are an immediate and necessary 
bulwark against biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. Dating to Plato (400 
BC), or, more recently, to environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold (1949) in 
the mid-twentieth century, the idea of ecosystem services is not new; and it 
was formalized in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the early 2000s 
(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). 

We must focus on the failure of our institutions and the crucial role of civil 
society and empowered citizenry. Humanity’s dominant governance 
frameworks—which lurch from one election cycle to the next, tending 
towards centralization and technology-heavy silver-bullet thinking—are 
woefully inadequate in both their capacity to identify critical and pressing 
priorities and in their ability and agility to deal with them. The influential 
(and deeply erroneous) idea that markets could potentially self-regulate to 
limit environmental degradation is a stark example. How is it that our 
dominant economic paradigm demands a barrier-free world when it comes 
to trade, but this thinking does not extend to our ability to address global 
environmental, health, and other critical human challenges? While we hail 
the globally integrated marketplace, our collective expertise and insight still 
operate in silos—a compartmentalization that is encouraged by the very 
structure of our institutions. We have the knowledge needed to act, but our 
national and global governance systems fail repeatedly in integrating these 
diverse strands of knowledge into a basis for necessary action.  

Some of this has to do with the sheer scale of the challenges that humanity 
faces. Both climate change and the biodiversity crisis are problems that 
need pan-national, global responses. The solutions to our current 
predicament might lie in a three-pronged approach: First, ensure that 
demand does not exceed sustainable supply, which means that we must take 
less from the natural finite stocks of Earth than we put back into it. Two, 
change the way in which we measure consumption and economic progress 
by accounting explicitly for the impacts that economic activity has on 
biodiversity. Finally, the first two can only happen if we radically restructure 
economic thinking itself. 

The first part of this approach is a daunting challenge that spans the entire 
gamut of demand and supply, from individual choices to societal and 
cultural priorities to governments and the international community. Much 
has to do with incentives. At an individual level, if every person aspires for 
the standards of living of the Global North, it would lead to the 
unsustainable extraction of our natural capital, as it does today. Avoiding 
this will need a profound readjustment in the way individuals and societies 
value certain lifestyles over others. For governments, for instance, it is often 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [8] 

easier to demonstrate purely economic growth than it is to ensure universal 
health and hygiene. Preventive healthcare has been shown to be far more 
economical and efficient than curative medicine, but the latter is favoured 
by industry and economic metric-oriented governments. For the market—
and for the technology sector in particular—promising avenues that can 
mitigate the biodiversity crisis (such as the use of high-yield, genetically 
modified crops that can help reduce the pressure to cultivate high-
biodiversity and high-carbon natural habitats) need better incentives. Other 
approaches, such as payment for ecosystem services (PES), have gained 
traction in some parts of the world, but they need governmental and 
institutional support (Redford and Adams 2009), even though they might 

have their own pitfalls in implementation (Büscher 2012).  

The second approach—changing how we measure economic “success”—
has a long pedigree. Simon Kuznets, who created the concept of GDP as 
we know it in 1934, was himself well aware of its pitfalls: “the welfare of a 
nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national 
income…” (Kuznets 1934, 7). The use of monetary income as an indicator 
of individual well-being has also been widely criticized. Finally, how we 
think of the economy must change. The bedrock of the global economy is 
biodiversity: agriculture, livestock, fisheries, timber, even fossil fuels. None 
of these are infinite—economic growth will cease when biodiversity falls 
below the level at which it can replenish. Our growing cultural distance 
from the natural world (Kesebir and Kesebir 2017) has accelerated this 
process. Unfortunately, both development and conservation, particularly 
exclusionary approaches, only seek to increase this disconnect.  

The crux of our predicament, though, is the issue of property rights and 
systems of ownership of property— “ownership” both literally and in the 
sense of identity engendered by de facto rights over land, water, and the 
resources that can be harvested therein. Given that our natural resources are 
ultimately “commons” shared by all of humanity, we cannot over-emphasize 
the importance of effective governance of shared resources, from Hardin’s 
original (mis)conception of the tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968) to 
Ostrom’s principles that emphasize the importance of trust, cooperation, and 
social capital in the management of common pool resources (Ostrom 1990).  

However, the idea that “neither top-down nor bottom-up institutional 
structures work well” perhaps arises from historical ham-handedness in 
implementing initiatives at mismatched scales (Dasgupta 2021: 494). For 
instance, bottom-up approaches, where communities assume stewardship 
of traditionally managed resources, can be far more effective in protecting 
biodiversity (from short- to medium-term threats such as overexploitation) 



[9] Umesh Srinivasan and Kartik Shanker 

than top-down statist interventions or market-driven outcomes such as 
privatization (Gaymer et al. 2014). Unlike state-mandated initiatives, 
bottom-up approaches are also far more flexible and responsive to site-
specific and highly local socio-economic and cultural mores (Waylen et al. 
2010). However, we need to centralize policies that deal with threats such as 
climate change, which operate over far larger spatial and temporal scales. 

The centrality of land (and water) ownership and management practices to 
both the local and global economy, and to effective biodiversity 
conservation, is now beyond any doubt. One of the key drivers of the 
success or failure of top-down versus bottom-up conservation approaches 
at any location is likely to be ownership—both material as well as cultural—
over land, water, and other resources (Burivalova et al. 2016; Kelkar 2018). 
We need more creative forms of natural resource ownership and 
management that can assure tenure to local communities and customary 
practices while simultaneously ensuring positive environmental and 
biodiversity outcomes.  

However, an issue that TEB does not address is the political ecology of 
biodiversity conservation. While inclusive rights-based conservation has 
gained traction, earlier exclusionary approaches continue to be in effect in 
many parts of the world. Moreover, new movements like Nature Needs 
Half and Half Earth3 (Wilson 2016) have emerged, and, despite trenchant 
criticism (Büscher et al. 2017), continue to have a following. In addition, 
biocentric approaches like compassionate conservation 4  (Wallach et al. 
2018) have also been gaining ground, though they could have negative 
social and ecological impacts (Oommen et al. 2019). While TEB rightly talks 
about empowering communities and engaging citizens, it does not specify 
the nature of this engagement, which will determine the long-term success 
of these actions.   

                                                        
3 The Half Earth movement proposes that half of all land and sea on Earth needs to be 
protected to preserve biodiversity and the health of the planet. However, it has been heavily 
criticised on grounds of social justice in that it would disproportionately affect economically 
weak and politically marginalized communities. Furthermore, it does not address current 
levels of resource extraction and consumption and offers no path forward for biodiversity in 
the human half. 

4 Compassionate conservation is the idea that individuals of any species (including non-
native invasive species such as feral cats) matter and must not be killed or harmed. It has 
been argued that this is an animal rights-based approach that is incompatible with the goals 
of conservation, which are to sustain species and ecosystems. In addition, adopting this 
approach could have negative consequences for many communities who live in proximity to 
dangerous animals and preclude opportunities for them to gain from the sustainable harvest 
of animals. 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [10] 

A crucial ecological issue on which TEB could have focused more strongly 
is habitat connectivity. Climate change has already caused species to move 
across the globe in response to changing temperatures. Fish are moving to 
deeper waters and cooler latitudes away from the equator; insects—such as 
agriculturally important pollinators—are also shifting their geographical 
ranges rapidly. Increased barriers to the climate change-driven movement 
of species is highly likely to result in the extinction of large fractions of the 
biodiversity that humanity depends on for its survival. In addition to 
protected areas, therefore, connectivity between natural habitats should be 
an urgent and immediate priority. In the absence of such connectivity, 
climate change has the potential to disrupt human economies and well-
being, not only due to its direct effects such as rising temperatures and 
changing rainfall patterns, but also due to the catastrophic loss of 
biodiversity. 

Finally, TEB does not dwell enough on the nature of knowledge generation, 
which continues to be dominated by western, white institutions, and has 
been called out for being systemically racist; meanwhile, within 
predominantly black, indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) countries, 
it is biased towards the privileged and elite (Chaudhury and Colla 2020; 
Shanker and Oommen 2021; Trisos et al. 2021). This influences the very 
nature of the questions we ask and therefore the inferences we reach about 
human–environment interactions and sustainability.  

The bottom line is that change is necessary at all levels, from markets to 
government to society. And if these reforms do not come soon, a pandemic 
will be the least of humanity’s problems. 

 

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