The Frontiers of Global Nature-Based Solutions: Lessons from the Economics 4 Nature Project

By Ben Martin (Communication and Publications Manager - Green Economy Coalition Secretariat)

If societies are to survive and thrive, we must recognise that all of our economic wealth and development fundamentally depends on a healthy natural world. We are dependent upon nature – clean water and air, healthy soil for food, flourishing ecosystems and biodiversity for climate, pollination, and so on. Continuing to degrade nature will undermine our wellbeing.

A system-wide transformation is needed. This is a system that ensures that adequate knowledge can inform decisions in such a way that they choose to protect, restore, sustain and invest in nature. Nature’s value must be made visible by putting natural capital at the heart of economic decision-making.

The GEC, together with the Capitals Coalition, the Green Growth Knowledge Partnership (GGKP) and WWF France, spent six years pushing for exactly this at the global level. The joint Economics 4 Nature project worked closely with international and national organisations in France, the European Union, Brazil, Uganda, Madagascar, and India. Here’s what was learned.

Five Lessons for Global Nature - Based Solutions

Lesson 1: The concept of natural capital — although not universally supported — helps to make nature ‘material’. Focusing on valuing natural capital is an effective way to progress nature positive economies. Although expressing nature as a ‘capital’ can be contentious, six years of E4N experience shows that it helps mainstream nature’s value into business and financial decision-making and development planning.

Lesson 2: Embedding natural capital approaches within global, regional, national and local agendas takes radical collaboration, perseverance, political awareness, knowledge, and capacities. To really understand the value of natural capital, is vital because policy, finance, business, scientists and civil society communities all engage with each other.

Lesson 3: There is no single blueprint for how to stimulate a green economy transition. A ‘good’ solution for a nature positive economy will vary depending on the societal, economic, environmental and political context. So a wide scale change will require a variety of initiatives. It is also clear that balancing short-term urgent needs with longer term planning is challenging, but always needed. Recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates this. To support this balance, every policy proposal should have a systematic assessment of its implications for nature, people and the economy.

Lesson 4: There is no globally-agreed definition of a successful economy that values nature and people as equally-critical elements of a thriving planet. If this can be agreed and if societies can fundamentally shift how they regulate and incentivise economies to deliver positive outcomes for nature and people, then business actions, investment strategies, and policy will change.

Lesson 5: There is a sharp — but also ever changing — divergence in how ‘the North’ and ‘the South’ can integrate natural capital concerns into decision-making. The mainly richer OECD countries are integrating natural capital into economic policymaking, and business and financial practice. Other countries that have more limited ‘fiscal space’ and mounting debt-stress (exacerbated by issues like COVID-19) are generally finding this more challenging. Innovative financial strategies, including debt management strategies, are needed to support this fundamental change.

The Frontiers we must Cross

Four frontiers must be explored and crossed to achieve a sustainable future for people and nature:

We must put people at the heart of nature positive economies. Nature positive economies will not find the support they need to accelerate and endure unless everyone feels included, rewarded and listened to. Indigenous Peoples, for instance, who steward the natural environment and also deal first hand with the impact of nature degradation have their knowledge that must be listened to routinely because such knowledge shapes biodiversity policy processes.

We must mainstream common frameworks, standards, tools and methods for valuing nature into public and private decision-making processes and policies. This is needed if all stakeholders (including businesses, finance, governments, and communities) are to recognise the environmental risks and opportunities that present themselves. This would work best with deployment of tools like the natural capital accounting frameworks (e.g. the United Nations System of Environmental Economic Accounting-Ecosystem Accounting for the public sector, and the Natural Capital Protocol for the private sector). They also include green taxonomies that define what counts as sustainable activities for governments or financial markets (the EU and China, among others, led the development of these green taxonomies), and aligned standards and principles for green bonds and other financial products.

We must advocate for systemic economic reforms that ensure regulation and incentives, as well as public and private funding, and support nature positive economies. A successful economy must include nature positivity and social equity as definitive elements. There are many leverage points; notably: cultural rules must be shifted, incentive structures must be examined, and behaviours must be questioned to see whether they support positive outcomes for people, nature and the economy.

We must advocate for nature-based solutions that build climate resilient and nature-positive economies. Nature-based solutions work with nature to address societal challenges, thereby benefitting human wellbeing and biodiversity. Strengthening our natural environment must be central to daily decision-making, and so too must human wellbeing if nature-based solutions are to work. The UN Decade on Restoration highlights the urgency of preventing, halting, and reversing the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.

Conclusion

Crossing these frontiers will require a fundamental societal shift that makes nature highly political and legally enshrines a fundamental human right to a healthy environment. We must expand and renew a social contract that includes nature for a safe, fair, and sustainable future. This step is already taken at the global level, with the United Nations’ adoption of the right to a healthy environment in July 2022. Over 150 nations have already enshrined some form of this right in their constitutions. This commitment must be translated into concrete government and business agendas with as big a profile as the climate and environmental crises. Social movements are already calling for this rights-based approach to nature positive economies.

Indeed, the E4N legacy lies not only in frameworks, protocols, tools, methods and projects, but also in the champions (individuals and institutions) that emerge; in the narrative of nature positive economies; and in the ways that the E4N mission and vision has influenced and continues to shape each partner’s work.

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