Natural Wealth
Blog post by Richard Benwell, WWT's Head of Government Affairs:
On Budget Day, we count our gold.
It’s a national day of reckoning, when the Chancellor sets out the economic situation and the Government’s plans for spending and investment.
But it is never a picture of the true wealth of the nation.
The Budget begins with a report on the nation’s finances, a monetary measure of growth and investment, the value of goods and services produced in the UK.
It completely ignores our natural wealth, the natural assets that form the bedrock of any economy: clean air and water, productive soils, woods, hills, wetlands, and meadows. These asset bases deliver vital services like agricultural productivity, flood mitigation and sheer enjoyment for millions of people.
We are missing billions of pounds of value off our national balance sheet. In doing so, we continue to allow this asset base to be eroded. What other productive assets would we allow to be eroded so casually?
The Government is working on a plan to turn things around: a 25 year plan for the environment. Central to that plan should be a way to account properly and prominently for our natural wealth.
Each year, alongside the Budget, the Government could produce a Natural Wealth Statement, setting out how’s we’re doing on key natural assets. Much of the data is already available, but it is hidden away in a quiet DEFRA press release. Instead, the state of our natural wealth could be afforded as much status as conventional measures of national wealth.
Hearing this, people sometimes say that the public would struggle to understand such an abstract concept. But in a society where we grapple daily with the fate of the FTSE, financial flows, and growth in GDP, is it really so hard for people to understand the value of river flows, a biodiversity index, or the concept of green growth?
This year’s Budget is the latest in a line of Budgets that buys economic growth by cashing in our natural riches, but will it really lead to a wealthier nation?
Accounting for our environmental assets in an annual Natural Wealth Statement to Parliament could give a truer record of how our economy and society are doing. Only by basing law and policy on the need to invest in our environment will we ensure that we achieve real, green growth.
