Three big ideas for protecting and enhancing nature's bounty

Mike Childs

24 July 2013

Nature's amazing. Isn't that obvious? It certainly is from the reading I've done for the second topic in our Big Ideas Change the World project. But it isn't obvious to everyone. If it were humanity wouldn't be assailing it in the many ways we are. We've identified three big ideas to protect nature and provide well-being for people.

The second topic is bioproductivity. By 'bioproductivity' we mean nature's ability to produce biomass for food and fibre; the biodiversity that brings resilience to the system; the ecosystem services that nature delivers; plus the knowledge that we can learn from nature. In other words: the whole package of goodies that we get from nature or nature's bounty.

We've tentatively identified a number of big ideas for how we use human's ingenuity, empathy and compassion to nurture bioproductivity and use it wisely - big ideas that fundamentally challenge the business-as-usual approach followed by the UK Government and others which pursues competition and profit above working with nature to produce long-term sustainable yields.  

Here are the three big ideas we're concentrating on:

• Using land and water for more than one purpose - so called multifunctional management of ecosystems means largely shifting from monoculture management of land and oceans to approaches such as agroecology, agroforestry, and ecosystem based fisheries management. This means focusing not only on the production of one crop but also, for example protecting biodiversity and ensuring long-term resilience.
• Healthy diets - A global shift towards an affordable, diverse and healthy diet for all will enable pressures on land to be reduced, enabling greater protection of biodiversity but also potentially creating space for bioenergy with CCS to take carbon out of the air. The shift will require eating lower on the food chain, reducing wastage and avoiding over-consumption of meat and dairy products. Achieving this shift will require among other things incentives, choice editing, regulation and taxes. 
• Ownership and access to nature's bounty - to ensure well-being for all it will be necessary to develop governance regimes that recognise bioproductivity or nature's bounty as a global shared resource to protect, nurture and hand-on to future generations. This will mean a governance regime that holds in common the underlying means by which bioproductivity can be sustained, including biodiversity, the genetic resource base, land, healthy soils and functioning water and nutrient cycles.

What do you think of these three big ideas? Are they achievable or is the change too great? Are they absolutely necessary?

We'll be working with leading thinkers to develop these Big Ideas further, when we've done so we'll invite people to critique these ideas.

We did identify other big ideas for this topic which we will look at later as we consider other topics in the Big Ideas Change the World project. These are in our synthesis paper.

Please do share your thoughts on our thinking to date.

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