Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about

achieving ambitious leadership for the environment. In this episode, Jim Elliott, senior policy

advisor at Green Alliance, talks to Karen Ellis, Director of Sustainable Economy at WWF UK.

We need government to take the action that will really embed those environmental goals in both economic policy,

in regulation, for example, of the financial sector, and in corporate governance mechanisms,

so that it really gets to the

heart of the way that economic decisions are made. Thanks so much for offering us up your

economic experience today, Karen. We're talking about the recently launched Economics of Biodiversity

Review, which was led by Professor Partha

Das Gupta and commissioned by the UK Treasury. It's a massive report. It runs to about 600 pages.

What for you are kind of the main messages that we should be taking away from it?

In a nutshell, I suppose the way I'd summarise it is really that

it's saying that nature and biodiversity are really crucial for our economy and for our future

prosperity and well-being, but basically we've been using it up at a much faster rate than it can

replenish itself. And that's because of some deep-rooted market failures and institutional failures that go to the heart of how our economy works.

And that to address that, we really need to make some significant reforms to our economic and financial system.

And then it lays out a variety of things that need to happen to address that.

And first and foremost,

it's saying that we need to stop destroying nature, obviously, and start investing in it.

In other words, we need to create what we call a nature-positive global economy.

Yeah, brilliant. Is the review saying anything new? Did we already know all this? Or is it providing something that we didn't know?

I think a lot of environmentalists will see much of what they already understood. And there's been a lot

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