On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us – Transforming Economics to Value Nature and Combat Climate Change

From the man that the New York Times calls “the most important person you’ve never heard of,” renowned Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta, comes a paradigm shifting treatise, asking a simple yet profound question—what if we put a value on nature, just as we put a value on everything else? 

For just about everything of value in life, there is an economic model. If it matters to us, we have found a way to put a dollar amount on it—to quantify its importance in our lives and society. These models and metrics tell us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. And yet for as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture; they fail to account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. Indeed, for centuries we have been using nature as if it were limitless, but more than ever, we are recognizing that our demands on the natural world are unsustainable.

In On Natural Capital, award-winning Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta lays out a seminal new approach to economics that asks, what if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else? Rooted in mankind’s struggle against climate change, Dasgupta’s approach examines the existential need to rethink our relationship to nature and see its preservation as an economic imperative. Challenging much of economic thought that has come before, Dasgupta presents an urgent call to transform the focus and structures of global economics with a profound new model—one so radical that only an economist of his stature could make the world take it seriously. On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.

Sir Partha Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Previously, he taught at the London School of Economics and Stanford University. His research has covered development economics, the economics of technological change, population, social capital and ecological economics. In 2021 he was awarded the Kew International Medal of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and in 2023 was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire for "services to economics and the natural environment." In February 2024 he won The Frontiers of Knowledge Award.