Edited by Lisa Ann Mandle - Green Growth That Works

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Keywords: Island Press, natural capital, ecosystem services, green economy, green development, inclusive green growth, payment for ecosystem services, payment for environmental services, gross ecosystem product, environmental policy, environmental finance, conservation policy, conservation finance, sustainable development, sustainable growth, policy instrument choice, poverty alleviation, livelihood security, human development, equity, green finance, transformation

Dedicated to all the heroes reaching well beyond their own lives to help realize a bright future for people and nature on our shared planet Earth.

Lisa Mandle, Zhiyun Ouyang, James Salzman, Ian Bateman, Carl Folke, Anne D. Guerry, Cong Li, Jie Li, Shuzhuo Li, Jianguo Liu, Stephen Polasky, Mary Ruckelshaus, Bhaskar Vira, Alvaro Umaa Quesada, Weihua Xu, Hua Zheng, and Gretchen C. Daily

Growth in human population and economic activity has dramatically transformed our planet since the Industrial Revolution. While driving significant improvements in human well-being, these forms of growth also deeply eroded the natural capital embodied in Earths lands, waters, and biodiversity. Rapid economic development has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and raised the standard of living and life expectancies of many more, but the costs of this success cast a long shadow over future well-being.

Massive degradation and loss of forests, wetlands, coral reefs, grasslands, and other ecosystemsalong with their waters and speciesare creating grave risks. Severe inland and coastal flooding, sand and dust storms, extreme climate events, and unhealthy air and water threaten the security of food, water, climate, energy, health, and livelihoods. Taken together, these harms constitute a sobering counterbalance to economic growth.

Yet the world is waking up. Policymakers, development organizations, businesses, and private investors are joining civil society organizations and scientists in forging a new development model. The quest is ambitious: to improve the human condition while securing natures life-support systemsin other words, to create pathways toward inclusive green growth.

Over two decades of innovation in research and implementation demonstrate the feasibility of this ambitious yet urgent and vital goal. The challenge now is to move from ideas to action on a broader scale (Guerry et al. 2015). Doing so requires a clear focus on values and mechanisms.

Moving to inclusive green growth necessitates a rigorous understanding of the significance and values of natural capital for human well-beingtoday and for the future. Whether in the public or private sector, decision makers will need to be persuaded of the benefits from major investments in nature and nature-based solutions compared to their costs. This understanding has been advanced rapidly through scientific research (going back to Jansson et al. 1994 and Daily 1997), as well as via international efforts such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Going from ideas to action also requires creating innovative, effective policy and finance mechanisms that drive regeneration and promotion of natural capital and the provision of ecosystem service benefits (Daily and Ellison 2002). These approaches typically have deeply intertwined, dual goals of securing the well-being of both nature and people.

In this book, we put the emphasis on the natural capital dimensions underpinning inclusive green growth, highlighting the recent, rapid innovation in demonstrating the economic and national securityas well as the inclusive and ethicalcase for securing nature. And we emphasize the experience in diverse countries worldwide in implementing innovative policy and finance mechanisms. Our focus on natural capital complements other efforts around inclusive growth (de Mello and Dutz 2012), inclusive development (Teichman 2016), and green economies (Jacobs 1993).

Recognition of the value of natural capital is not new: one can find examples of wise conservation practices from societies throughout history. Yet, today, many human activities not only fail to consider natural capital but actively degrade its value. Because services from natural capital are generally public goods and not reflected in market prices, their loss is often unrecognizedor at least uncheckeduntil the consequences become too large to ignore. A famous case is China, where massive deforestation in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River led to devastating flooding in 1998. In 1999, China began to launch what is still the largest payment for ecosystem services program in the worldthe Sloping Land Conversion Programwith dual goals of flood mitigation and poverty alleviation (Liu et al 2018).