Nature provides us with air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink. The metal in your laptop, the wood in your desk, the glass made from sand – they all come from nature. We depend upon these resources and yet, as we extract them, we are destroying places where wildlife lives.
There are an estimated 1 million species at risk of extinction. As a result, the delicate balance between species that sustains life on Earth is at risk of collapse, with damaged ecosystems making the climate crisis worse, undermining our food supply and putting livelihoods at risk. Half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according to the World Economic Forum.
Carbon emissions are only part of the story when we think about destruction of the environment. The United Nations has told large businesses that by 2030 they should also be disclosing their impacts and dependencies on nature. But what does this mean in practice? At the Guardian, we’ve been working it out with researchers at the University of Oxford. It means examining all our daily activities: from the newspapers and website we produce to how our journalists get to work.
