We Are Exhausting Nature – We’ve Got to Change How We Do Business

This article was originally published on LinkedIn. 

“WWF’s Living Planet Report is one we read closely each time its published. It provides us with a clear insight into how the world’s biggest and most important ‘factory’ – nature – is performing.

What the report shows sadly, is that this ‘factory’ is under pressure. No one in a company would accept that the most important part of their business has become 58% worse since 1970, or faces a forecast decline of 67% by 2020. Yet this is what is happening to nature according to the Living Planet Report. Our natural assets – forests, soil, fish, water etc are not being replaced at the rate we are using them.

And boy is it an important factory. Without nature we have no wool or cotton to make clothes; no fish, fruit, vegetables or crops to feed people; no atmosphere or oceans to absorb the waste that our way of life produces. Our entire, globally growing, economy needs nature for every product and service we consume daily.

I use the word ‘factory’ uncomfortably. Nature cannot be shrunk to an asset on the annual company balance sheet. It’s got to have a higher meaning in our lives, something to be cherished, nurtured and handed across safely to the next generation. But I use it deliberately and provocatively because right now that’s how the world is using it…”

Read on at: LinkedIn.