Source: WBCSD

The results of the recent Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 11) in Hyderabad, India, suggest that international efforts to halt the loss ofbiodiversity and ecosystems are bogged down in a tussle over resourcing. Given the cold realities of donor countries' finances, the potential for any large increases is very limited.

Governments must spend money on traditional biodiversity conservation and reign-in land conversion, but the fate of the world's biodiversity depends on more than protected spaces. The environmental pressures of human production and consumption on climate change, ocean acidification and the pollution of fresh water mean that even well-protected natural areas are starting to degrade.

Our challenge is to stop those pressures in their tracks and to gradually reverse them. It's all about treating the world's natural capital – water, biodiversity, atmosphere and the ecosystem services they provide – as the scarce and valuable resources they are. Quantum leaps in sustainable management, eco-efficient use and restoration of all resources – whether for food or fibre production, for manufacturing or tourism – are needed. For this to work, businesses and the consumers they sell to, need an incentive to do the right thing.

This will only happen if scarce natural resources are valued properly and used wisely. Some major companies are taking the lead, accounting for the value of the resources and ecosystem services they're using even if they aren't currently required to pay for them. Others are using eco-labelling and certification. Sustainable forest management, food production and water use can go hand in hand with ecosystem restoration.

These piecemeal innovations are setting a good example, but initiatives by trailblazers aren't enough. It's the job of governments to mainstream rational, environmental behaviour – including their own. At present, numerous government policies are damaging the economy and the environment. Subsidising the production and consumption of fossil fuels – to the tune of half a trillion dollars a year – is one of the many public expenditures that skew the playing field against efficient resource use.

Governments must use their regulatory power to impose taxes and offer fiscal incentives to ensure that resource use takes a more sustainable path. They can develop efficient, business-friendly mechanisms to pay for natural capital. They can look at their own footprint through their procurement policies and run clean, state-owned enterprises. And yes, they can spend some scarce tax revenues on biodiversity protection and investment in greener infrastructure.

To make a real difference, we must bring together best business practices and the best framework policies, aligning bottom-up and top-down. And that means governments and businesses need to be working together.

At Rio, earlier this year, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) defined the problem: letting the "invisible hand" of the market sort out winners and losers in a vacuum of externalities, with a blind eye to the growing social inequality and the overuse of discounted natural resources, quashes the business case for the main beneficiaries to give up their power and initiate the changes.

The Council called on governments to introduce policies that raise the cost of unsustainable practices and echoed that in Hyderabad when it urged governments to "pick up the pace" on public policies that deliver positive outcomes for biodiversity.

The OECD is, in turn, committed to working with its 34 countries and many more partner countries to identify the most cost-effective way of promoting green growth and the sustainable use of biodiversity. Without a policy revolution that takes natural as well as social capital seriously, neither governments nor businesses will get beyond some nice case studies. Without scale, the shrinkage of our biodiversity will continue. The OECD projects a further 10% loss of biodiversity by 2050 if policies support business as usual.

There is no shortage of sceptics who ask whether valuing natural assets and services is not the road to hell. If everything has a price, surely everything can be bought and trashed? That's why the policy framework is so important. By 2050, with 9 billion people on Earth, pressure on the environment will be intolerable if we don't properly price the resources they need. Green accounts – whether they are national or corporate – may not be a perfect way of keeping people honest. But they would be a huge improvement on the status quo which mortgages our common future without any idea – or concern — for the long-run costs.