Our Planet: Our Business.

The Our Planet series on Netflix, launched in April 2019, has become the platform's most successful documentary series ever. It aims to showcase the wonder and variety of life on Earth, emphasizing the importance of biodiversity for the planet's health. The team behind the series carries a crucial conservation message, highlighting the ongoing sixth mass extinction and the grave threat posed by biodiversity loss, on par with climate change. They emphasize that there can be no jobs on a dead planet, and urge taking action to create a better world for the future.

This paragraph describes Earth as a living, breathing organism where habitats made up of countless species work like organs, each playing a crucial role in maintaining the planet's health. It highlights how various biomes, such as the poles, sea ice, freshwater systems, forests, mangroves, coral reefs, and jungles, contribute to regulating the climate, providing oxygen, protecting coastlines, and supporting life. The biodiversity within these biomes is essential for maintaining stability, and humans have greatly benefited from this stability during the Holocene epoch, a period of remarkable environmental constancy that gave rise to modern civilization.

This paragraph discusses the Great Acceleration, a period of unprecedented change and growth that began around 1955. While it brought many technological and economic advancements, it has also led to unsustainable exploitation of resources and pressures on the planet, marking the beginning of the Anthropocene, or the Age of Humans. The human impact has been immense, with deforestation, overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change threatening the planet's stability. The paragraph emphasizes that humans have replaced the wild with the domestic, and only 4% of mammals on Earth are now wildlife.

This paragraph highlights the severe consequences of continuing on our current trajectory of environmental degradation. It warns that if we maintain a 'Business As Usual' approach, we risk triggering irreversible and self-amplifying changes that could push the planet away from equilibrium. The paragraph paints a bleak picture of a future where a child born today could witness the collapse of coral reefs, soil degradation, food crises, supply chain breakdowns, and large parts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable. The cost of dealing with this future is estimated at over $550 trillion, nearly double the entire wealth in the world today.

This paragraph offers hope and a path forward to avert the catastrophic future outlined in the previous section. It emphasizes that we have the intelligence and technology to become positive 'Anthropocene stewards' and shape the future of the planet. However, drastic action is required within the next ten years to alter our course. The paragraph outlines a broad strategy for businesses to embrace sustainable practices, including transitioning from fossil fuels, reducing land impact, respecting ocean resources, adopting circular economies, and redefining growth models. It highlights the need for a 'green revolution' driven by businesses, just as they powered previous global changes.

This paragraph delves deeper into the strategies businesses must adopt to achieve sustainability. It emphasizes the importance of designing products and processes that fit within circular economies, where waste from one process becomes a resource for another. The concept of 'waste' itself is challenged, as everything can be repurposed or recycled in a circular system. The paragraph also addresses the need to redefine economic success beyond perpetual growth, arguing that thriving does not necessarily require constant expansion. Instead, businesses should aim to mimic nature, adapting to thrive within the finite boundaries of the planet.

This paragraph presents a vision for a sustainable future driven by business innovation. It highlights the growing demand from the next generation of customers, employees, and CEOs for businesses to prioritize sustainability and social responsibility. The paragraph emphasizes that sustainability has become a business imperative, and companies that embrace the transition to renewable technologies, sustainable supply chains, and circular economies will not only contribute to environmental protection but also gain competitive advantages. It calls for businesses to collaborate with policymakers to accelerate progress toward a sustainable world, harnessing human ingenuity to solve this critical challenge.

This paragraph describes the potential for the planet to 'rewild' and regenerate once humans adopt sustainable practices. It highlights examples of species recovery and ecosystem restoration when given the opportunity, such as the increase in fish biomass in protected ocean areas and the regrowth of forests in areas where deforestation has been reversed. As the wild spaces recover, they can once again contribute to carbon sequestration, pollination, seed dispersal, and climate regulation, ultimately creating a more stable and productive environment for human societies to thrive within. The paragraph emphasizes that nature once determined human survival, but now humans determine nature's survival, underscoring our responsibility to restore the balance.