来源：《卫报》
2021年2月5日
One of the most important things about this week’s landmark review into the value of nature may appear to be a detail: its publisher. The 600-page report was commissioned by the Treasury, headed by Rishi Sunak, rather than the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whose boss is George Eustice. The difference appears to be tiny – the two ministries are a mere 10-minute walk apart – but it represents a huge paradigm shift. For this is the first time any country’s finance ministry has put out a comprehensive study into the economic importance of maintaining a variety of life on Earth. Its author is Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist. He argues that our economic models and our models for how to run an economy both require urgent reform if humanity is to survive and prosper.
本周对自然价值的里程碑式报告中最重要的一点似乎是一个细节：它的发布者。这份长达600页的报告是受里希苏纳克领导的财政部的委托，而不是受乔治尤斯提斯领导的环境、食品和农村事务部。这个差别似乎很小——两个部门之间仅相隔10分钟的脚程——但它代表了一个巨大的范式转变。因为这是第一次有某个国家的财政部门对维持地球上生物多样性的经济意义进行全面的研究。报告的作者是剑桥大学经济学家帕萨达斯古普塔爵士。他认为，如果人类要生存和繁荣，我们的经济模式和我们如何运行经济的模式都急需改革。
For so long, government ministers have treated biodiversity as the to-do list, beneath winning the next election and ensuring asset markets and public services are not in meltdown. Doing much about it has never seemed a high enough priority.
长期以来，政府部长们一直将生物多样性视为待办事项，优先级在赢得下届选举，确保资产市场和公共服务不会崩溃之后。在保护生物多样性方面多做些事情似乎从来都不是一个足够优先的事项。
While the world is focusing on the battle against Covid-19, environmental experts from the UN to the World Health Organization have been busy pointing out that this pandemic’s root cause is humanity’s slow destruction of nature. Destroying forests to create farms and build roads, bringing wildlife into contact with people, is fundamentally how this fatal virus spread from wildlife into humankind. The result is 2.2 million deaths and rising fast. As Prof Dasgupta observes, the destruction of nature means that there will be another pandemic – and another, with all the devastation to life and economic value they could bring.
在国际社会聚焦于新冠肺炎疫情防控的同时，联合国、世界卫生组织等环保专家纷纷指出，疫情的根源在于人类对自然的缓慢破坏。破坏森林以建造农场和道路，致使野生动物与人类接触，是这种致命病毒从野生动物传播到人类的根本原因。其结果是220万人死亡，而且还在迅速增加。正如达斯古普塔教授所观察到的，对自然的破坏意味着将会有一场又一场的大流行病——以及随之而来的对生命和经济价值的破坏。
No wonder, then, that his report begins with the assertion: “Our economies, livelihoods and wellbeing all depend on our most precious asset: nature.” He is, admittedly, not the first economist to point this out. Think of Karl Marx arguing: “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values … as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature”. Among Prof Dasgupta’s useful suggestions is to dethrone GDP and to start factoring natural capital into our economic accounting.
难怪达斯古塔的报告一开始就断言:“我们的经济、生计和福祉都依赖于我们最宝贵的资产：自然。”无可否认，他不是第一个指出这一点的经济学家。想想卡尔马克思的论点:“劳动不是所有财富的源泉。自然和劳动同样是使用价值的源泉，而劳动本身只是自然力量的表现。”达斯古塔教授提出的有用建议之一是，废除GDP的主导地位，开始将自然资本纳入我们的经济核算。
Terms such as “natural capital” and “natural assets” horrify some environmentalists, who predict more marketisation of things that should never be bought or sold. That is clearly a risk. But if instead government officials emphasize the value in nature and build it into policymaking, that can only be a good thing.
诸如“自然资本”和“自然资产”之类的术语让一些环保主义者感到恐惧，他们预测，那些永远不应该被买卖的东西会更多地被市场化。这显然是一种风险。但如果政府官员强调自然的价值，并将其纳入政策制定，却是一件好事。