The Our Planet series
launched on Netflix in April 2019.
In just the first month,
it was watched in over 25 million homes
around the world,
and is already
Netflix's most successful
documentary series ever produced.
It was the first series of its kind
to carry an important
conservation message at its heart.
It set out to showcase the wonder
and variety of life on Earth
and reveal why this biodiversity
is so important
to the health of the planet.
The Our Planet team are carrying
this message beyond the series.
Right now, we are in the midst
of the Earth's sixth mass extinction.
One every bit as profound
and far-reaching
as that which wiped out the dinosaurs.
This is a story
that everyone needs to know.
Fundamentally, Biodiversity is the key
to the future of humanity.
Most people understand
that a changing climate
is a threat to our future survival.
But few know
that the loss of our biodiversity
is just as grave a threat.
There will be no jobs on a dead planet.
For too long, we have overseen
the destruction of the wild animals
and wild spaces on our planet,
and we are now beginning
to feel their loss.
But we must not give up hope,
for there is a path,
and it's a clear one.
We can create a much better world,
but it won't happen by default,
it won't happen automatically.
This film will reveal
just why our biodiversity is so important,
and the role business can play
in saving our planet.
The business sector has no option
but to be a force for change.
Earth, as far as we know,
is unique in its capacity
for life.
Millions of species,
billions of individuals,
each with their own characteristics.
Leading their own lives.
But lives that are
connected intimately
to the lives of others around them.
This is the Earth's
great biodiversity.
It is a wonder to behold.
And yet, so easy to take for granted.
Our planet
has not always been like this.
Before life, Earth was a wasteland.
Its climate was chaotic
and wildly unstable.
Its atmosphere,
a turbulent mix of noxious gases,
and its oceans and lands poisoned.
It was the evolution of life
that changed all that.
Life has undoubtedly served to create
more and more comfortable conditions
for life itself on this planet,
creating the soils on the planet,
a stable atmosphere
and better conditions
for successor species.
The more diverse and complex
life on Earth became,
the more it was able to capitalise
on the growing opportunities
that arose,
the more productive
the living world grew.
There's been this remarkable development
through to an amazing diversity,
millions of different species,
all of which are dependent in some way
upon each other.
And now our planet is alive.
It operates just like a living,
breathing organism.
Its habitats, made up
of countless different species,
work like its organs.
Each with a different role to play
in keeping the planet healthy.
Our planet's poles act
like an air conditioning system,
reflecting sunlight
away from the planet to keep it cool.
The sea ice works like a soil,
harbouring algae,
which underpin the hugely productive
food chains in the cold oceans.
Freshwater systems transport
life-giving water and nutrients
throughout the landscape,
criss-crossing its surface
like the arteries and veins in a body.
Immense forests straddling the globe,
and trillions of microscopic floating
plants in the surface of our oceans
maintain the atmosphere
by locking away carbon
and releasing oxygen.
Coastal mangroves and coral reefs
act like breakwaters,
protecting the lands behind
from the eroding waves
and creating the perfect nurseries
for juvenile fish.
And jungles pile plant upon plant
to capture as much
of the sun's energy as possible.
The water and oxygen
produced in this process
reach far beyond the forests.
For any one of these biomes to work,
the plants, animals, fungi
and microbes within them
must all play their part.
Only as an ensemble
can the living world work its magic.
Biodiversity equals stability.
And no species on Earth
has benefited more from this fact
than us humans.
It's no accident that we have risen
to dominate the planet
in the last twelve thousand years,
a geological age
we call the Holocene.
Now can you imagine,
the average mean temperature on Earth
fluctuates during this whole period,
since the last Ice Age until today,
plus/minus one degree Celsius.
Plus/minus one degree Celsius!
I call it the Garden of Eden
for humanity.
The Holocene was the most stable
period of time that we know of,
a period of calm that gave birth
to our modern civilisation.
It's this stability
that gives us all the seasons.
We started to realise,
Hey look,
it seems like it starts raining
every year at the same time in May
on the Savannah.
And it rains roughly twenty-one,
twenty-two times
until it ends in October
for the dry season.
And it does so every year.
The Monsoon just harmoniously
comes back and leaves,
comes back and leaves.
In the Temperate Zone,
you see the temperatures exceed
fifteen degrees Celsius,
just at that point in spring
and then it goes on,
and then suddenly
at the solstice in October,
the temperatures go down.
And this has given us
our cropping seasons.
Our ninety-day plus season
from planting to harvest.
We know now that it was
the invention of agriculture
which took us on the journey
towards modern civilisation
as we know it.
Blessed with this moment in time,
we developed with incredible speed.
We set down roots,
our populations began to rise.
Discovering fossil fuels,
we mechanised our societies.
By 1955, we're 3 billion
co-citizens on Earth.
We have so far not had any impacts
at the planetary scale,
we're still the small world
on a big planet.
But that is the moment.
Ten years after the Second World War,
there is technology,
there is reasonable peace,
there is trust.
That's when we entered
the Great Acceleration.
The Great Acceleration,
which continues to this day,
has been a period
of unprecedented change.
We have achieved
a great many things during this time.
Technology,
driving advances throughout the globe.
Our world becoming connected
as never before.
And, above all else, business has boomed.
No other period of time has seen
such productivity and growth.
As many people became richer,
GDPs rose, diets changed.
We ate more meat.
Farming techniques intensified
and fishing fleets got bigger
and more efficient
to match our demand.
Life expectancy and quality of life
for many around the world
improved dramatically.
In the last fifty years,
the number of people on Earth
has more than doubled,
each new citizen a new customer
keen to experience the benefits
of the Great Acceleration.
Just over the past fifty years,
we have embarked
on an exponential rise of unsustainable
exploitation of resources,
unsustainable pressures on the planet,
which has now reached such magnitude
that science concludes
that we have become
our own geological epoch.
Welcome to the Anthropocene.
The Age of Humans.
We are now the dominant
force of change on the planet.
Three quarters of the land surface
and two thirds of the ocean
are impacted by our activities.
Our poles are losing their ice.
In the summer,
there is forty percent less Arctic
sea ice cover than there was in 1980.
Many of the world's great rivers
and lakes are drying up.
Lake Chad,
fifty years ago, it was twenty-five
thousand kilometres square of water.
And now,
ninety percent of the water
has just evaporated.
Around the lake, you have more
than forty million people living.
Everyone wants access
to the shrinking resources.
Almost half of our planet's forests
have been felled for their timber,
and to make space
for ourselves and our livestock.
About sixty percent
of global deforestation
of the tropical forests of the planet
is to produce beef.
About thirty percent is to produce crops,
mostly soy in Latin America
and then in southeast Asia: palm oil.
Mangroves, full of colour and life,
are being cleared to make way
for shrimp farms and beach resorts.
And at sea,
our extensive overfishing is leading
to the collapse of key fish stocks.
We have already lost ninety percent
of large oceanic predators,
like tuna, sharks and swordfish.
The cod stocks crashed back home
in Newfoundland where I was from
and, you know, thousands of people
thrown out of work,
boats beached, canneries emptied.
And what was interesting is that
you can build up an economy and culture
for hundreds of years,
and it can be wiped out overnight
unless we protect our environment,
protect our ecosystems.
And that was the real wake-up call.
And I think that's where
I began to understand
that there will be no jobs
on a dead planet.
We have replaced the wild
with the domestic.
We and the animals we raise to eat
make up ninety-six percent of the weight
of mammals on Earth.
Just four percent is made up of wildlife.
Half of the fertile land on the planet
is now farm land.
Our takeover of the natural world
has been so successful,
that in the last fifty years,
populations of wild animals
have declined on average by sixty percent.
This global loss of nature
is already making the planet
less stable.
We are today, the first generation
to know for certain
that we're putting
the whole planet at risk.
Imagine, the maximum
temperature variability
over the whole Holocene
is plus/minus one degree Celsius.
We are above that already today.
As the planet warms, weather systems
are becoming less predictable.
Deadly storms, fires and floods
are all becoming more frequent
and more severe.
Over ninety percent
of people on the planet
breathe dangerously polluted air.
I have just become a grandfather.
I have a one-year-old grandson.
He is in Mumbai right now,
as we speak,
and I worry, like all grandparents do,
about the pollution in Mumbai.
I wake up every morning wondering,
"Is something damaging his lungs?"
which is going to spur action
and innovation.
It's about staying alive.
It's only as we have started
to lose things
that we have begun to realise
the true value of nature.
As Earth's biodiversity drops,
things we have taken for granted
start to disappear.
Clean air and water,
the food we eat,
the soil it grows in.
A benign climate,
productive seas.
A healthy world provides us
and our businesses
with all of these for free.
But if we were to place
a value on them,
the services
that biodiversity provides for us
are estimated to be worth
twice as much
as the entire globe's GDP.
The destruction of our natural world
is already costing us
trillions of dollars every year.
Suddenly,
the costs of the Age of Humans
are outweighing the benefits.
We are at risk
of entering a danger zone
where we could trigger irreversible
and self-amplifying change
which could push the whole planet
ultimately away
from the desired equilibrium.
We are at risk
of destabilising the whole plant.
If we continue with Business As Usual,
scientists predict
that a baby born today
could barely be in her twenties
by the time the soils
of the frozen north thaw,
releasing their locked methane,
and any chance
of controlling the climate is lost.
She could be in her thirties
when the last of the coral reefs collapse
as a result of ocean acidification
and warming.
By the time she is sixty,
overuse of fertilizers and pesticides
could have killed off
soil microorganisms
and pollinating insects.
There would be no more fertile soil.
The weather becomes
increasingly unpredictable,
leading to a global food crisis.
Supply chains in multiple sectors
may have broken down.
As she reaches her eighties,
our planet could be four degrees warmer.
She may have lived through
the extinction of countless species.
Large parts of the Earth
may be uninhabitable.
And global peace,
an impossibility.
The cost of dealing with this future,
if even possible,
is estimated to be over five hundred
and fifty trillion dollars.
Almost double the entire wealth
in the world today.
Our current trajectory
leads to a catastrophic future.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
The Anthropocene has both
a negative and a positive side.
Thanks to the fact that we are now
so clever and so dominant,
we can use our own intelligence
and our technologies
to become
positive Anthropocene engineers,
Anthropocene stewards.
So it's up to us.
We are in the driving seat,
determining the future
for the whole planet.
We have to understand the moment
as a fundamental fork in the road
in human history,
in which we must make
an active and thoughtful choice.
While our past has been written,
our future is yet to be determined
and is in our hands.
This is not about saving our planet,
this is about saving ourselves.
We are the chief beneficiaries
of our biodiverse, stable home.
Our civilisation won't work
without it.
To change this situation will require
action on an industrial scale,
and at an unparalleled speed.
We have just ten years
to drastically alter our path
before it will be too late to avoid
catastrophic changes to our planet.
It's about understanding
that this is critical.
We have to increase
our forest cover.
We have to restore degraded soils.
We have to clean up
our rivers and our oceans.
We just have to.
It's not about, "Wouldn't it be nice."
No. It is an absolute imperative.
We need revolutionary speed,
we need a green revolution,
and it needs to happen at the scale
and at the speed
of the digital, internet
and mobile revolution.
And what drove the speed and scale
of these revolutions?
Business.
The same force that powered
the last period of global change
can also power the next.
If we can reimagine
Business As Usual,
and make it fit for our planet,
a finite world
that works best the wilder it is,
we will be in with a chance.
Every company needs
to turn the lens on itself
and ask how are we designed
and how does the way we're designed
shape what we can and can't do,
who we can and can't be in the world.
The broad strategy
for this new Business As Usual is clear.
We just have to make sure
that everything we do, we can do forever.
This means all of us must ensure
our investments and supply chains
strive to achieve
five universal goals.
We must transition from fossil fuels.
Successful businesses will embrace
the clean technologies that now exist
to replace them.
Are we going to run out
of wind and sunshine in Texas
before we run out of fossil fuels?
I'm betting on wind and solar.
First and foremost, I'm a businessman
and the original decision
was a business decision.
How can we have cost certainty
over the long term
and mitigate price volatility?
Wind and solar won out.
Renewable energy already accounts
for one third of global power.
The faster we can complete
the transition,
the better our long-term gains.
The living world is faltering,
partly because we're taking up
too much space.
Sustainable businesses will help us
reduce our impact on land
as much as possible.
Logging and managing forests
selectively.
Employing new technologies
to produce as much as possible
from as little as possible.
Growing crops
on already deforested land.
All of this will help to reduce
the amount of space we take up.
When my father took over
this property fifteen years ago,
he cut the forest.
I planted the first trees.
We planted the first citrics,
the first bananas.
I started to introduce life
back into the ecosystem.
We don't need to cut down more forest.
We have enough land on this planet
for production for everybody.
And it is business
that will invent brand new sectors
to bring about
the most unexpected solutions.
We're trying to build a world where,
in ten years or fifteen years from now,
the majority of the meat
and the majority of the eggs
produced on this planet,
didn't require an animal,
didn't require all this land,
didn't require all this water,
and we can enjoy it just the same.
New ideas and land management strategies
will help us protect our biodiversity
and feed more people with less land.
The health of the ocean is critical
to the way our planet operates.
Future businesses will respect it
as a resource
that belongs to all of us,
only taking
what it can naturally replace.
When you set aside
one third of the reef,
you are opening up
two thirds of the reef for fishing,
but one third is being protected
that will actually sustain the population
of the marine life that you're fishing
in the open two-thirds area.
We want to do our share of
providing food for the rest of the world,
but we have to do it
in a sustainable manner.
Technological advancements
will help businesses
prove the sustainability
of their supply chains,
giving consumers more power to choose
sustainably sourced products.
We live on a finite world.
Yet we don't act like it.
Next-generation businesses
will design their product lines
to fit within circular economies.
We need to create industries
that don't use things up,
but use them again and again and again.
Waste from one process
becomes food for the next.
There's no such thing as waste, actually.
Waste is just a resource
in the wrong place.
That's even true for carbon dioxide.
It's true for plastics.
It's true for everything we think
we're throwing away - there is no away.
So we need to create economies
with infrastructure
that enable that circular design.
All businesses will seek out
their place within the cycle.
I have seen an amazing number
of companies
really innovating
at the top of their game,
looking at their products
and solutions and saying,
"OK, instead of taking virgin resources,
can we look at waste materials?
Can we turn trash into treasure?
Can we innovate
and offer sharing business models
in which we reward consumers
for being more eco-friendly,
or we enable communities
to make money from their trash?"
This is a revolution
that's happening,
and I'm very excited to see it.
Even the most complex,
global business communities
will work to eliminate waste.
We asked all of our suppliers
to tell us exactly which material
was in their packaging.
And we said, "By the end of 2019,
we want to take no material
into our business that's not recyclable.
Can you manage that?"
If we do set a standard,
most of our suppliers
will want to come with us.
We can do that.
As a responsible business,
why wouldn't we?
The most damaging element
of today's society
is its quest for perpetual growth.
We've got an economic system
that depends upon growing forever.
How does that reconcile itself
with a thriving planet?
Growth for growth's sake
will have to lose its attraction.
We cannot think of economic success
if we're deteriorating the environment,
and I think that has to be
in the essence of each person
that wants to lead a country,
to lead a company.
The new sustainable economy
will readdress this.
We need to create economies
that allow us to thrive,
whether or not they grow.
But something can thrive
without getting bigger.
It's just thrumming, alive,
creating, regenerating, doing well,
and it looks great to us
and we feel the energy in that.
Our reinvented model
for Business As Usual
will ultimately begin
to mimic nature.
Adapting to thrive
within the finite world about it.
Indeed, there is no alternative.
We have come here to let you know
that change is coming,
whether you like it or not.
Save our planet! Save our planet!
And the signs are that the next generation
of customers, employees and CEOs
already knows this.
This is our last chance to act,
before the world as we know it collapses.
I think there's a huge change in the way
millennials think about business.
If you ask any other generation,
"What is the purpose of business?"
they will say,
"What colour is the sky?
The purpose of business
is to make money."
If you ask millennials that question,
forty-seven percent said some version
of the purpose of business
is to improve society
and protect the environment.
This is a fundamental sea-change
in the way an entire generation
thinks about business.
It's going to mean that if you want
to attract the top talent and retain them,
if you want to win over
millennial customers
and attract
the thirty trillion dollars of capital
that's currently
being given to millennials
by the baby boomer generation,
you're going to have to have a narrative
around how your products
are sustainable and healthy.
You're going to have to have
an impact story as well.
Sustainability is now
the only business plan,
which means sustainability
is now a business imperative.
So the vital thing
the business community needs to do
is come together to encourage politicians
to set the global frameworks
that will accelerate progress
to a sustainable world.
If we have political leaders
investing in renewable technologies,
investing in sustainable technologies
promoting products
that are both good for the populace,
that people will love
and that will prevent this climate crisis,
then we'll get there even faster.
We humans
are the greatest problem solvers
the world has ever known.
We will solve this problem too.
I committed, on behalf of my two hundred
and twenty-five thousand colleagues,
that by the year 2040,
the entire Mahindra Group of companies
would be carbon neutral.
For both palm oil and soy,
we have sustainable sources
for one hundred percent
of what we sell within the UK
and in Central Europe,
and about forty percent
in our Asia business.
So we have a commitment
to get to one hundred percent in total.
Our generation, we want to abolish
the use of fossil fuels,
and that gives me a lot of hope,
because it is possible.
Companies that embrace
the transition can prosper,
and even gain an advantage.
I think in the future,
when we look back,
there will be two types of companies -
companies that got it
and companies that didn't.
I know which segment
I'd like to belong to.
I'm hoping we'll be out in front,
cleaning up on a lot
of the opportunities
before other people recognise
this simple truth.
The only viable future
is one in which business innovates
to demand less of our world.
In that future, the wild will recover.
And as it does so,
bring back the stability
and productivity that we rely on.
Since commercial whaling was banned
just over thirty years ago,
some species have recovered
from all-time global lows
to numbers not seen
in hundreds of years.
Some areas of ocean protected from fishing
have seen fish biomass increase by over
four hundred percent in just a few years.
Wherever we leave space,
forests, wetlands, grasslands
and mangroves will regenerate.
Now we have shown that
it's possible to reverse deforestation.
We've done that in the last decades.
We reached twenty percent of our coverage
with forests,
and we managed to increase that
to fifty percent, currently.
As they grow back,
the wild plants will lock away
carbon again,
helping us fight
against a changing climate.
The animal pollinators
and seed dispersers will return.
The sea ice could start
to build at the poles once more.
The weather we rely on
for our supply chains
could fall back into regular rhythms.
Our planet can rewild.
And as it does so,
become more diverse and more stable.
Which is exactly
what we humans need to thrive.
We can restore the balance of nature,
fix the relationship
between our planet and our business,
and change the way we live on our planet
for the better, forever.
Nature once determined
how we survive.
Now we determine
how nature survives.
