Don't Mess with Nature - Don't Mess with Nature: Covid19 Wildlife Markets

Don't Mess with Nature: Covid19 Wildlife Markets

04/08/20 • 17 min

Economists estimate the economic fall out from the COVID-19 virus pandemic could approach $10 trillion dollars, or around one eighth of global GDP. A letter to the World Health Organisation this week, signed by almost 250 organisations, points to a solution. A massive crackdown on wildlife trade markets worldwide. It is time to call out this health crisis for what it is - a by-product of the US$ billion trade in environmental crime.

When seeking the origins of this crisis, we need to look less into human health, but into the collective blindness among regulators and within the financial sector of the huge dependencies the global economy has on biodiversity, and the devastating impacts on us all when our effect on these dependencies, becomes increasingly unsustainable. COVID-19 is nature’s $10 trillion dollar bite back, and this is just the beginning.

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Next Episode

Don't Mess with Nature: Reinventing Life.

The planet doesn’t need us. But as humans, we need the planet. We’ve been around only about 3 million years, and yet in such a short time, we’ve taken over the whole earth, and completely changed it. We’re harnessing everything to do with the earth and turning it for our own use. And that has consequences.

An example of that is COVID-19 which has suddenly broken out across the planet like Nature’s time bomb that will cost the world some $10 trillion dollars. Unless we change the movement of money, we’ll continue to finance ourselves into extinction. The finance industry has done a great job of dissociating ourselves from our own money. But what’s the point in having a pension fund if when it pays out, you can’t breathe the air? We have to get to a better state of equilibrium between financial capital and natural capital. And that is what has driven me to swim against the current of this river, right up to the headwaters to work with the financial sector itself.

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