What Has Nature Ever Done for Us?

What Does Nature Do For You?

Nature does a lot more for you than you think, and yet nations striving to improve their people’s lifestyles, survival and aspirations don’t safeguard nature. Businesses and governments everywhere tend to overlook the planet’s no-cost services and their economic impact. Natural activities, from photosynthesis to the water cycle, create cost-free common public goods, but when humanity misuses them, they can produce negative externalities. What does nature do for you? Everything. Nature provides a crucial set of services, including:

• Soil grows crops, stores carbon, and recycles decomposing plants and animals.
• Photosynthesis turns sunlight energy into chemical energy, and CO₂ into oxygen.
• Biodiversity provides products, such as medicines, and key processes that science has discovered through “biomimicry” – that is, copying the natural world.
• Animals pollinate about two-thirds of the world’s “species of food crop plants.”
• Birds control pests and pathogens by eating insects and recycling carrion.
• Geological and forestland filtration purify and conserve water.
• Wild fisheries offer...