Fudan-LSE Lecture Series No.64

Title: 

Natural Capital and Sustainability: Connecting Measurement and Policy

Speaker: 

Prof. Giles Atkinson, LSE

Host: 

Prof. Yijia Jing, Fudan IGPP

Time: 

12:00-13:00, November 22nd, 2024

Venue: 

Room 805E, 8th Floor, West Sub-building of Guanghua Towers

https://www.wjx.cn/vm/emIBKBu.aspx# 

The Speaker：

Giles Atkinson is currently (Acting) Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Professor of Environmental Policy in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His specialist expertise is sustainability economics where his work has focused in particular on the theory and practice of metrics of sustainable development, especially those based on wealth accounting and natural capital accounting. He has published widely on these topics over the past 30 years, including three monographs. Professor Atkinson has been a member of a wide-range of environmental policy advisory bodies over his career. This has included membership of the: UK Natural Capital Committee; Policy and Technical Experts Committee for the World Bank’s WAVES Partnership (Wealth Accounting for the Valuation of Ecosystem Services); and the Advisory Board of UNEP’s TEEB Review (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity).

Abstract:

Conserving, and restoring, natural capital is crucial for the sustainability of social and economic development. This lecture will explore this link between natural capital – the wealth represented by nature such as natural resources and ecosystems – and establish the context in which this wealth remains under immense pressure from depletion and degradation. Public policy has a crucial role to play in relieving these pressures. This lecture further emphasises the importance of measuring the value of natural capital in official statistical systems connected to these policy processes and decisions. Prominent cross-country examples of this include World Bank (2024) “Changing Wealth of Nations”. The lecture draws also on research on valuing the Congo Basin forests. Conversion of some portion of these forests is an explicit policy goal in this region. There is an important role for understanding what might be lost and what is to be gained from conserving this natural capital.