Introduction

 

Regent's Park Healthcare (RPH) has been providing socially conscious and responsible healthcare in the UK for more than 20 years.

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At RPH, we believe that the most significant economic transformation in history is well underway. Our economic framework is unsustainable, because it relies heavily on exploiting the environment in ways that also damage it. While nature supports over half of all economic activity, the fact that this contribution is rarely understood means that we are inadvertently destroying the value our planet enables us to create.

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Our current economic model is no longer fit to organise economic activity around 8 billion people. For instance, we currently extract nearly 100 billion tonnes of raw materials from the environment each year to produce goods that, most of the time, aren’t in use. The production and disposal of those goods generates approximately 70 billion tonnes of waste annually, destroying our most productive economic asset – nature – in the process. The depletion, disruption, and destruction of nature that is inherent to our economic model has now led us to exceed many manageable limits, risking the collapse of natural systems and, in turn, economies.

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Now that human impact has become the primary driving force of environmental change, many business models that worked in the past are no longer suitable for the future. Today, our economy relies extensively on extractive industries which are depleting and degrading the very natural capital upon which they depend. This has to change. We must shift towards a nature-positive economy that closes the loop on our ecological footprint, values the natural resources we rely on, and minimises our adverse impact on the natural capital that sustains our society and economy.