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The Murex Snail
The murex snail was once the most valuable resource in the world. Over 3,600 years ago, Phoenicians (ancient Lebanese) from Tyre discovered that boiling parts of sea snails yielded a dye known as Tyrian purple. The result was magic. Unlike other colours, Tyrian purple intensified with wear—a quality so remarkable that only the highest born (think Cleopatra and Caesar) were deemed fit to ‘wear the purple.’ Tens of thousands of snails were crushed to stain a single swatch of fabric—a slaughter so all-encompassing that the murex vanished from the Mediterranean shore. The Phoenicians killed their golden goose. Tyre never recovered the wealth and status it had once enjoyed.
Many businesses today make the same mistake. Like the Roman emperor who never thought of the snail behind his rarefied cloak, they fail to internalise the lesson that long-term prosperity depends on well-functioning ecosystems. Everything we produce—from chocolate to microchips—relies on the health of the air, soil, water, plants and animals hiding in plain sight.
The Complexity of Nature
‘But business has never priced externalities,’ I hear you protest. A 2022 review of 400 companies found only 5% had a good understanding of their environmental impacts. The reason? Nature is complex. Businesses tend to lack the systems thinking needed to appreciate how different parts of the natural world interact and depend on one another. Instead, they manage risks in simplistic traffic-light sequences, from ‘green’ to ‘red’ via ‘amber’—as if the living world can be summarised for review on a boardroom dashboard. But nature doesn’t work this way.
Take a river. Its health depends on countless living and non-living factors—the abundance of denitrifying plants, mineral deposits from rocks and sediments, animals drinking, breeding, dying, and decomposing in its waters. These factors are in constant flux. Yet the ecosystem finds balance, and on that balance the river’s health depends.
This complexity makes it hard for policymakers and business leaders to act—especially when pricing ecosystem services puts their jurisdictions or operations at a competitive disadvantage. Yet these barriers are not insurmountable. Three forces are converging to make nature a priority, much like the 2015 Paris Agreement did for climate: the weight of science, the tightening grip of regulation, and the growing influence of capital.
The Science: Our Planet is Dying
We are living through a mass extinction event. Since 1970, vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 69 percent. A staggering 94% of all mammalian biomass on Earth consists of humans and domesticated animals. Since 2020, the mass of all built infrastructure outweighs the total mass of all living things. Every day, the equivalent of 2000 garbage trucks of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers, and lakes. There’s a term for this destruction: ecocide.
The ecological—and even spiritual—crises these facts invoke should be reason enough for action. Personally, I hate the idea of pricing nature to save it—the act reveals a deep pathology at the heart of our modern civilisation. But the economic stakes alone are reason to act. A 2023 study found that 55% of global GDP, or US$58 trillion, is moderately or highly dependent on nature. When ecosystems collapse, economies follow. Businesses and governments must help save nature, or watch our long-term prosperity degrade alongside it.
Regulation: Between ambition and obstruction
In December 2022, 188 nations at COP15 pledged to halt biodiversity loss, committing to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030. At COP16 in Cali, developed nations went further, promising US$20 billion annually to support conservation efforts in developing economies.
Regulation is advancing unevenly, marked by both progress and setbacks. Political shifts, particularly in the United States, have weakened environmental commitments, while resource-dependent economies—from Western Australia to Brazil—face pressure to stall reform. Even where biodiversity policies gain traction, they are often underfunded, weakly enforced, and undermined by vested interests.
Still, momentum persists. The EU’s Nature Restoration Law, despite fierce opposition, came into effect in August 2024, setting legally binding targets for ecosystem recovery. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is gaining traction, with financial institutions under increasing pressure to account for biodiversity risk. China’s Sponge City program, which deploys nature-based solutions like wetlands and permeable pavements to manage urban flooding, is transforming water management across 30 major cities, covering 450 square kilometres. This innovative approach demonstrates how urban planning can work with, rather than against, natural systems.
Capital: The Smart Money Moves
The global economy is waking up to the fact that nature is not just an abstract moral concern but a material risk. Sectors from agriculture to pharmaceuticals are under pressure to confront their exposure to biodiversity collapse, supply chain breakdowns, and escalating environmental threats.
Markets, ever pragmatic, have begun to price these vulnerabilities. Biodiversity credits, regenerative agriculture, and natural capital funds are gaining traction. Some investors remain sceptical, but extreme weather, water crises, and failing soils and fisheries will soon eliminate any illusion of choice.
Democracies, meanwhile, are trapped by the short-term incentives of the electoral cycle. Investors, counter-intuitively, often have longer time horizons. They see what many governments refuse to admit: that economies built on ecological destruction will, inevitably, collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
Reimagining Prosperity
Prosperity—as defined by GDP growth alone—is meaningless if it is a prelude to collapse. The question is not whether change is necessary, but whether we will act before nature enforces the reckoning for us.
Indigenous knowledge systems have long understood that humans are not separate from nature but deeply connected to its stability—managing landscapes, stewarding resources, and maintaining balance through practices refined over generations. Yet these traditions of stewardship remain largely ignored by the global economy.
From debt-for-nature swaps and regenerative agriculture to natural capital accounting and large-scale rewilding projects, we already have the tools for a sustainable future. But instead of embracing them at scale, our dominant economic model remains wedded to the illusion of boundless growth—assuming ecosystems will endure any abuse and that technology will somehow replace what we destroy.
The oceans do not negotiate. The forests do not lobby. The laws of nature cannot be rewritten by economists. If we fail to act, the biosphere will eventually respond in the only language it knows—collapse. At that point, even the wealthiest among us will discover that we cannot eat quarterly earnings.
We’d love to hear your thoughts – email luke@bwdstrategic.com or message him on LinkedIn if you’d like to continue the conversation.
About the Author
Luke Heilbuth is CEO of sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a former Australian diplomat.