Biologists have long thought that speaking to nature’s economic value would persuade boardrooms it was worth saving. It hasn’t worked – so what, if anything, will?

Zooming out from these esoteric debates about ecosystem services, what really stayed with me were all these biologists I met who basically shrugged their shoulders, gave me these sad sighs of resignation, and conceded that they didn’t actually believe these strategies were going to work. Yet they still embraced the framework.

However disappointing, these decades of failure can also function as an urgent invitation to break from routine but ultimately self-defeating political assumptions, and to reach for more convincing (and yes, more realistic and pragmatic) alternatives.