How much damage have we done by thinking "the economy" sits outside nature?
There’s a silence at the heart of our economic statistics.
Every quarter, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) publishes a number that shows how much economic activity has taken place in Australia recently.
We’ve all been conditioned to think it’s a good thing if that number goes up a little each time.
But what was the environmental cost of that increase in economic activity?
The ABS data doesn’t tell us.
And economists who write analyses of the quarterly movements in economic growth don’t talk about it either. And federal budgets don’t mention it.
Everyone ignores the elephant in the room.
Who’s accounting for the environment?
But our economic growth doesn’t occur in a vacuum.
It still depends on the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the exploitation of other elements of nature.
To achieve the latest quarter of economic growth, how many more hectares of native forest were logged, how many more animal species became extinct, and how much more plastic did we pump into the environment?
We’re never told.
But imagine if that kind of environmental information was published alongside the quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) figure.
Every three months, the ABS would tell us economic growth increased by 0.6 per cent in the last quarter, say, and by 5.9 per cent through the year.
But it would also explain that New South Wales lost another 1,300 koalas last quarter, and Victoria logged another 750 hectares of its native forests, and our ocean fish stocks shrank by another 0.5 percentage points.
They could start with something like this, before getting far more granular:
If the information was presented that way, it would remind us that our economic system is constantly drawing down on the very resources that sustain life on earth: our forests, animals, soils, waterways and oceans.
And by making the relationship between economic growth and the environment transparent, it might change the national conversation.
Businesses could abandon their old model of profit-maximisation that excludes environmental destruction from its calculations, by turning environmental regeneration into a profit-making venture, Dr Ken Henry said.
“I think this is a game changer,” he told the ABC.
But if it feels like that’s an unnatural idea, at least you know where it’s coming from.
Source
ABC News
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