The Dasgupta Review provides a rich overview of the economics of biodiversity, paints a bleak picture of the current state of biodiversity, and is a call to arms for action in anticipation of the CBD COP 15. The Review takes a global perspective aimed at the high level of international and national policy on biodiversity, while elucidating the very local nature of biodiversity threats and values.

The approach is orthodox in its diagnosis via the language of externalities, natural capital, shadow pricing, asset returns, and the suite of remedial policies that follow. Yet, at its centre is an ‘unorthodox’ perspective: the economy is embedded in the environment and growth is limited. We offer reflections on this framing in light of its objectives for biodiversity.

The limits to growth message will be criticised and applauded in equal measure by different economists. The central place of valuation and the aggregated concept of biodiversity will draw criticism from outside the discipline. Yet the Review provides a foundation for biodiversity economics, and its largely orthodox framing may invoke the intended step change in the mainstream approach to economic growth.

The Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity is a comprehensive and high-level report on the economic explanation behind the current state of global biodiversity, the failings of the economic system that are responsible. It provides the policy prescriptions that economists ought to be making to reverse the impending, some would say current, disaster that the unfettered global economy is having on the biosphere (Bradshaw et al. 2021).

The statistics are eyewatering. Over the past 11000 years, the start of agriculture, terrestrial vegetation biomass has halved.

Moreover, in the last 500 years alone more than 20% of biodiversity has been lost, including over 700 plants and around 600 vertebrate species becoming extinct (Bradshaw et al. 2021).
The current rate of extinction is 15 times the background rate, meaning that we are on course for a mass extinction event (75% loss of species in a ‘geologically short period’: < 3m years, (Ceballos et al. 2015)).
Populations are down too, by nearly 70%. Furthermore, although known for some time that biodiversity loss, habitat destruction and the trade in wild animals is linked to zoonoses (e.g. Daily and Ehrlich, 1996; Pepin, 2013), we now find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic that appears to be linked to the sale of exotic species and the destruction of their habitats (Wu et al., 2020).
The costs of environmental degradation are now very tangible.