Cop 13, the international conference on biodiversity, has now drawn to a close. More than 10,000 people, including two hundred environment ministers and representatives of 196 countries and international organisations, met in Cancún, Mexico, to find a shared way of stemming the tragic and relentless disappearance of animal and plant species. In short, we need to understand (and preserve) the real value of natural capital. A value that is fundamental to our economies. Without exception.

All the services provided by natural ecosystems

Natural capital is anything but an abstract concept. The Wwf is keen to stress this point in its publication Living planet report 2016.

"The decline recorded in species populations is inextricably linked to the state of the ecosystems that support them. The destruction of these ecosystems represents a risk not only for the plants and wildlife that live within them, but also for human beings. This is because ecosystems provide us with food, fresh water, clean air, energy, medicinal remedies, and recreation. Furthermore, we depend on healthy and diverse natural systems for the regulation and purification of water and air, for climatic conditions, for pollination and seed dispersal, and for the control of pests and diseases."

Natural capital consists precisely of all the resources, renewable and non-renewable, that nature provides us with free of charge: plants, animals, air, water, soil, minerals. Resources that supply us with benefits, defined as ecosystem services. In and of itself, the stock of natural capital has evolved to become self-sufficient. Over recent centuries, however, human pressure has increased relentlessly (urbanisation, intensive agriculture and fishing, water pollution, and so on), consuming it at a rate that nature's own cycles can no longer sustain. We are the ones who lose out: because we will never find anyone to provide us, free of charge, with services even remotely comparable to those of ecosystems.

Let's stop thinking that nature is at our service

Even those who handle numbers and economic data day in, day out have come to realise this — namely the United States Department of Commerce, which has taken on the far-from-simple task of translating the value of biodiversity into figures.

Normally, the department explains, a company calculates the cost of the labour and raw materials it needs to produce a given good or service. In the past, the goods provided by nature were assigned a cost of zero, because — being free — they were taken for granted. But it is clear that this system no longer holds. Nature's services have a real, tangible value. What is more, the issue of externalities comes into play: anyone who makes use of natural resources will in some way affect others. And it turns out that these knock-on effects can carry an even greater weight than the benefit derived from the resource itself.

The economic value of biodiversity, natural capital in figures

In short, putting numbers to biodiversity is anything but straightforward. Many are trying, from the US government to United Nations agencies, with varying results. One of the most widely regarded answers is that given by Unep (the United Nations Environment Programme) in its report Dead planet, living planet, published in 2010. Biodiversity and ecosystems provide human beings with services that can be estimated at a value of 72,000 billion dollars a year. According to the World Bank, in the same year global GDP did not exceed 64,700 billion. In short, nature beats mankind. Perhaps this alone should be enough to understand that working with, and for, ecosystems is the only approach that makes sense. And the time has come to definitively retire the reckless notion that we can plunder their resources at will, in the belief that they will be available to us forever.

Opening photo: Frank Bienewald/LightRocket via Getty Images