This review is designed for individuals that seek to understand their place in nature as a citizen. This review constructs a grammar for understanding our engagements with nature – what an individual takes from it, how he/she transforms what they take from it and return to it, why and how in recent decades people have disrupted Nature’s processes to the detriment of their own and their descendants’ lives, and what people can do to change direction.
This review aims to explore the the definition of sustainable development, what criteria governments and private companies should use when choosing investment projects; what rules private investors should use to compare alternative asset portfolios; what should be the practices of companies producing the goods and services he/she purchases and consumes; whether the social returns on investment in family planning and reproductive health to meet the unmet needs of millions of the world’s poorest women are so low that the European Union assigns less than 1% of their international aid budget to them; and so on.
In this report, the natural world is studied in relation to the many other assets held in the portfolios, such as the vehicles we use for transport, the homes in which we live, and the machines and equipment that furnish our offices and factories. This review demonstrates that in order to judge whether the path of economic development he/she chooses to follow is sustainable, nations need to adopt a system of economic accounts that records an inclusive measure of their wealth.