̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Partha Dasgupta

̽��ֱ��price of ecological breakdown

fpjl2 — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 23:00:00 +0000

Cambridge researchers are investigating the economic consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss, and identifying ways to drive a more sustainable global economy.

Partha Dasgupta wins BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Economics

plc32 — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:14:23 +0000

̽��ֱ��16th edition of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management honours Professor Dasgupta for his work in defining the field of environmental economics by incorporating and quantifying the social value of nature.

̽��ֱ��award also takes into account Professor Dasgupta's leadership of an independent, global review on the Economics of Biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury in 2019. ̽��ֱ��Dasgupta Review is expected to help set the agenda for the UK Government’s 25-year environment plan.

̽��ֱ��BBVA awards committee said it commended Professor Dasgupta for laying the foundations of environmental economics through his pioneering work “on the interaction between economic life and the natural environment, including biodiversity.”

“More than any other economist of our time, Partha Dasgupta has stressed the important interplay between economic life and the natural environment," Chair of the BBVA selection committee and Nobel Economics laureate Eric Maskin said, adding that Dasgupta’s work and his proposals for measuring economic well-being “are critical for our time.”

̽��ֱ��citation for the award said that Professor Dasgupta provided conceptual foundations for the definition and measurement of sustainable development with the social value of nature as a determining factor. That in contrast with measures of well-being based on flows such as GDP, Dasgupta proposed measuring sustainable development as the change in the accounting value of total wealth, including natural capital within this indicator.

“These ideas...have provided a framework for green accounting which is now widely adopted for measuring sustainable development,” the citation concludes.

“Most economists who work on natural resources or the environment think about nature as providing certain types of goods, like food, clean water, timber, fibres or pharmaceuticals,” Professor Dasgupta said. “So these are goods. These are objects that you can harvest from nature and transform with our human ingenuity into a final product, like the clothes we are wearing or the painting in the room where you are sitting, and so forth. These are the things we make out of the goods that nature gives us.”

At the core of this conventional line of economic thought, he explains, is that when a good becomes scarce, you can substitute it with another offering the same or similar results. But as he delved deeper into the subject, Dasgupta came to realize that nature supplies something much more important and irreplaceable than goods. It supplies processes (or in more economic terms, services).

“My own understanding of economics,” he said, “has moved away from goods to processes. These are the key things we economists should keep in mind. Of course we care about nature’s goods, like water, food and clothing, because without them we wouldn’t be here. But none of this would exist without the underlying processes of nature.”

Climate regulation is among the services, or processes, that Dasgupta uses to illustrate his point: sunlight comes and gets reflected into space, water evaporates and comes down as rain.

“You have the water cycle and you get your drinking water from it. And what is not consumed doesn’t disappear, it just evaporates or becomes part of the ocean through the river system and so forth. But if you mess around too much with climate, you also mess around with the water cycle, which will end up weakened. Likewise, if you deforest too much or get rid of biodiversity in the Amazon, you’re going to exacerbate the climate system. So my work has been to bring these issues into economics.”

Dasgupta believes economics has become over-reliant on the idea that scarcity can be overcome by substituting goods.

“In industrial production, of course, this idea of substitutability has been a great success. Think of all the materials that are produced in engineering departments or material science departments. But there are limits to this, when you tamper with processes. Just think of the human body. You have the metabolic process, which keeps you in a healthy state, and it would be foolish to think you could substitute one process for another. You wouldn’t say let me have less digestive capacity, but more running capacity. It would be silly, because these two things go together.”

̽��ֱ��BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the recognition of talent.

̽��ֱ��BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognise and reward contributions of singular impact in physics and chemistry, mathematics, biology and biomedicine, technology, environmental sciences (climate change, ecology and conservation biology), economics, social sciences, the humanities and music, privileging those that significantly enlarge the stock of knowledge in a discipline, open up new fields, or build bridges between disciplinary areas.

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (Economics, St. John's) wins the BBVA award for Economics, Finance and Management for his groundbreaking work in environmental economics.

More than any other economist of our time, Partha Dasgupta has stressed the important interplay between economic life and the natural environment

Nobel Economics laureate Eric Maskin

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Cambridge achievers recognised in New Year Honours

ps748 — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 08:33:45 +0000

Economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta receives an elevated knighthood. Sir Partha, the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics, is made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire for services to economics and the natural environment.

Another economist, Dr Graham Gudgin, of the Centre for Business Research, is awarded a CBE for services to economic development in Northern Ireland. He said: "I am delighted to receive this honour in recognition of my time in Belfast running the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, as Special Advisor to First Minister, David Trimble, and working with Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, on tax reform for Northern Ireland. It was an honour to be able to use my experience as a member of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group to advance economic ideas and practice in Northern Ireland."

Professor Krishna Chatterjee, Professor of Endocrinology at the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, is also awarded a CBE for services to people with endocrine disorders. He said: “I am delighted that my contributions to endocrine disorders have been honoured in this way. This also represents the efforts of many scientists and clinical colleagues in Cambridge, and internationally, with whom I have worked over the years. Together with the patients participating in our research, we strive to advance knowledge and outcomes in rare hormone disorders."

An MBE is awarded to Elizabeth Blane, a laboratory manager for services to pathogen genome sequencing, and Natural Sciences undergraduate, Dara McAnulty, receives the British Empire Medal for services to nature and the autistic community in his native Northern Ireland. At 18, Dara, a student at Queens' College, is the youngest person to feature in this year's list. His 'Diary of a Young Naturalist' won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Conservation.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��'s Acting Vice-Chancellor, Dr Anthony Freeling, congratulated those being honoured: "How wonderful to see people so closely linked to the Collegiate ̽��ֱ�� being recognised in the New Year Honours list. It’s gratifying to see dedicated service acknowledged and rewarded in this way. My warmest congratulations to those colleagues and friends of the ̽��ֱ�� who have been honoured for their commitment and their achievements."

A number of academics, staff and an undergraduate student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge feature in this year's New Year Honours List, the first of the reign of King Charles III.

It's gratifying to see dedicated service acknowledged and rewarded in this way

Dr Anthony Freeling

Senate House

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Beyond GDP: Time to measure inclusive wealth and revolutionise economics

fpjl2 — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 09:18:11 +0000

Cambridge economists are at the forefront of a global movement to create new statistical methods that include vital components of prosperity – from nature to social bonds – currently absent from national accounting.

Dasgupta Review: Nature’s value must be included in economics to preserve biodiversity

fpjl2 — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 12:32:22 +0000

Nature is a “blind spot” in economics that can no longer be ignored by the accounting systems that dictate national finances, according to a major global review by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta.

Green recovery must end the reign of GDP, argue Cambridge and UN economists

fpjl2 — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:09:56 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� helps the United Nations launch a new 'Ecosystem Accounting' framework: allowing governments to better include and reflect nature in their post-pandemic economic recovery.

Ecosystems Overload

fpjl2 — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 09:48:57 +0000

We are laying waste to the biosphere. If we're serious about saving millions of species, then it's our own that must change how it thinks about, lives off and values the planet it inhabits.

Science turns to religion for “mass mobilisation” on environmental change

tdk25 — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 05:00:52 +0000

Two eminent scientists have made an impassioned appeal to the world’s religious leaders for help in curbing the potentially catastrophic effects of the ongoing abuse of the planet’s natural resources.

Writing in the journal Science the researchers say that religious leaders can instigate the “massive mobilisation of public opinion” needed to stem the destruction of ecosystems around the world in a way that governments and scientists cannot.

̽��ֱ��call is made in an essay, co-written by Partha Dasgupta, an economist at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate and atmospheric scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, ̽��ֱ�� of California, San Diego, who collectively have eight decades of experience researching environmental change and its effects.

Earlier this year, the pair organised a workshop involving more than 50 other academics at the Vatican, during which they also met with the Pope to discuss their concerns.

Their essay appears ahead of the United Nations summit on climate change in New York on September 23, at which Ramanathan will speak about the role that religions can play in mobilising public action on environmental issues. ̽��ֱ��chief editor of Science, Marcia McNutt, has meanwhile added her voice to the call in a supporting editorial, while Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard-based historian of science and climate change issues, has described the paper as “a watershed moment”.

Professors Dasgupta and Ramanathan describe humanity’s relationship with natural resources as being “at a crossroads”. They argue that this is characterised by a series of feedback loops, in which the planet’s natural capital is exploited to lift people out of poverty, resulting in a demand for food, water and energy that cannot be sustained. ̽��ֱ��net effect is not only the destruction of vital ecosystems like forests and fisheries, but ongoing poverty for millions of people.

̽��ֱ��solution to this, the authors say, is “massive collective action” by people to protect these environmental resources both on an international scale, and within their own communities. Organised religion, they suggest, is uniquely placed to help communities stand in the way of industrial activities and government policies which threaten the planet’s “natural capital”.

“Unsustainable consumption, population pressure, poverty and environmental degradation are intricately linked, but this is appreciated neither by development economists, nor by national governments who permit GDP growth to trump environmental protection in their policies,” they write.

“ ̽��ֱ��transformational step may very well be a massive mobilisation of public opinion by the Vatican and other religions for collective action to safeguard the well-being of both humanity and the environment.”

Professor Dasgupta, whose work focuses on the combined pressures of poverty, population and changes to the natural environment, admitted that it was “very rare” for scientists to appeal to religious leaders in this way.

“Religion has access to networks at every level in a way that scientists do not, and that’s really why we are appealing to them to help address common issues for the sake of a common good,” he said.

“I think that a lot of people see the religious contribution as a cosy topic which we should only discuss on Sunday mornings, but it could prove decisive. An organisation like the Catholic Church is structured in a way that makes it remarkably effective at, for example, leading a famine relief campaign. These are mechanisms that we should be using to tackle other global problems, including stopping governments from riding roughshod over people’s lives with disastrous effects for biodiversity.”

Alongside their potential role in turning public opinion, the paper suggests that religious organisations could provide more practical help, for example by using their charitable arms to provide the world’s poorest people, of whom an estimated 1.5 billion still struggle with pre-industrial technologies, with access to clean energy technologies such as biogas stoves and solar lamps.

Professor Ramanathan, who studies the climate effects of aerosols, has estimated that replacing the solid fuels on which many of the world’s poor rely for cooking, light and heat with more sustainable alternatives could have a significant effect in reducing near-term warming trends. “It is miraculous that eight decades of research by Professor Dasgupta and myself on the natural and social science aspects of environmental changes has led us to the doorstep of moral leaders of religions to rescue humanity from climate change,” he said.

Professor Dasgupta added that religious leaders could realistically collaborate with learned organisations, such as the Royal Society or the US National Academy of Sciences, to structure campaigns aimed at ending the over-exploitation of the planet’s natural resources.

“Not a single person whom we invited to our conference at the Vatican earlier this year turned the opportunity down,” he pointed out. “That suggests to me a cause for optimism; when people are asked to take part in something that involves helping others, there is not much resistance.”

Professor Naomi Oreskes said: “This is a watershed moment. For twenty years, scientists have been reluctant to speak out on the need to change business as usual for fear of being labelled ‘political,’ and reluctant to address the moral dimensions of climate change for fear of being labelled ‘unscientific.’ Now, following in the footsteps of great scientific and moral leaders like Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, Professors Dasgupta and Ramanathan remind us that we are all responsible for the common good.”

̽��ֱ��article, Pursuit of the common good, appears in the 19 September issue of Science.

Ahead of the UN summit on climate change, two leading scholars in the field make a watershed appeal to religious leaders for help in mobilising public opinion on the planet's future.

An organisation like the Catholic Church is remarkably effective at leading a famine relief campaign. These are mechanisms that we should be using to tackle other global problems, including stopping governments from riding roughshod over people’s lives with disastrous effects for biodiversity

Partha Dasgupta

Nitin Kirloskar via Flickr. Banner image: Growing Faith by Roxanne Ready.

Coal mine in Dhanbad, India. ̽��ֱ��biodiversity loss caused by the Indian mining industry has been widely criticised and is an example of the type of issue around which scientists now claim religious leaders could mobilise public action.

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