French central bank says: It's the ecology, stupid!

How to quantify nature? How to define its worth? these are central themes world leaders are grappling with going into the virtual UN conference on biodiversity (COP-15 - not to be confused with the UN climate conference Cop-26) a little over a month from now.

Biodiversity is fundamental to earth's life-support systems humans depend on. But governments, financial institutions and policymakers have failed to act accordingly for decades. According to the UN chief for biodiversity earlier this week, global goals agreed upon in Aichi, Japan, back in 2010 failed on all 20 accounts. This week countries are preparing to raise the bar even further.

To motivate governments to make the necessary investments, the updated UN draft for a global biodiversity framework being discussed this week now proposes that governments must 'internalise the value of nature and recognise the cost of inaction.'

The direct adverse financial and societal effects of climate change have been brought home by natural disasters in populated areas in recent years and are broadly accepted by economists.

But the effects of the loss of biodiversity - the loss of bees, the loss of prime forests on our socio-economic systems are not yet well understood.

According to the OECD, more than half of the world's total gross domestic product, or $44 trillion [€37 trillion], involves activities that are moderately or highly dependent on nature. But governments and financial institutions will need more exact figures to base their policy's on.

Last week (27 August), the Bank of France, the country's central bank, published a paper titled A Silent Spring for the Financial System?, invoking Rachel Carston's eponymous 1962 book about the damaging effects of pesticides (most importantly DDT) on natural ecosystems.

The central bank attempts to quantify the risk biodiversity loss poses to the economy. It aims to show the damage to (or the silencing of) the natural environment if our financial system keeps operating business as usual. It is only the second study of its kind that does so on a national scale, following an earlier effort by the Dutch central bank last year.

According to the bank's findings, the way money currently invested in France results in the loss of 4,800km of 'intact' nature a year or about 48 times the area of Paris.