In the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis, banks took big risks, secure in the knowledge that because they were so large, governments would be forced to bail them out if they began to fail. Bankers committed far more than their bank’s own assets and capital, which ordinarily act as a reserve and safety net in case of losses. They operated on the assumption that someone else would save them should the worst come to pass — as indeed it did.

Today, we treat nature in much the same fashion: drawing down resources without accounting for the economic and social impacts, and assuming someone else will save the day. But there is no safety net for natural resources; we cannot reproduce the diversity of resources we are losing at the scale we are losing them. And without diversity of nature at scale, we lose the underpinning of all life on earth, including humanity. Unlike policy responses to the global financial crisis, there is no equivalent bail-out mechanism for ecological overshoot and collapse.

It is time to change the way we measure the economic health of nations. Until we factor natural resources and, ultimately, human well-being into our economic thinking and planning, we will court financial and ecological catastrophe.

We are overdrawing on nature’s balance sheet, and on the verge of making decisions about our natural resources that could precipitate a collapse of the global economy. To prevent this fate, we need to measure our economic vitality with a broader compass of progress — one that expands beyond the value of products and services exchanged on markets to include assets such as the natural and human resources that enable these products. We can start with our most threatened form of capital: natural wealth.

Read the full article about putting a price on nature by Maxwell Gomera at Stanford Social Innovation Review.