I used to spend my days knee-deep in ponds, peering through microscopes, and running experiments to understand traits within populations change over time, i.e., how they evolve. As an evolutionary ecologist, I was interested in decoding the not-so-obvious rules of nature’s game: who survives, who thrives, and why.

When I moved into the private sector and focused more on the ecology end, i.e., how to measure biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at scale, and how to help corporates realise the value of their ecology. To be honest, I thought I had largely left the evolutionary element behind.

As you’ll have probably guessed, I was wrong. The more conversations I had with corporates, nature and climate startups, nature restoration project managers, the more I suspected that core evolutionary rules could explain behaviours around the nature and climate crisis. In particular, the Tragedy of the Commons.

Tragedy of the commons

What is the Tragedy of the Commons, I hear you ask? The tragedy of the commons is what happens when individual freedom to use a shared resource leads to the destruction of that resource. The destruction doesn’t happen because people are malicious, but because acting in self-interest makes sense in the moment. Imagine common land (in the UK, this is a community pasture open to everyone’s livestock). Each individual farmer knows that adding one more cow will give them extra milk/meat, while the cost (a slightly more overgrazed field) is shared by all. Rationally, each farmer keeps adding cows. Collectively, they ruin the pasture.

In today’s world, that “pasture” is our atmosphere, our oceans, our forests. We burn fossil fuels, overfish, clear land, not necessarily because we don’t care, but because the immediate rewards outweigh the distant consequences. Even well-intentioned people can find themselves making choices that, when scaled up, push the whole system toward collapse. Natural selection favours benefits in the short-term just as corporates favour actions that improve the share price in the short-term. Short-term comes before long-term and is thus needs to be satisfied first.

Legal frameworks are our human attempt to manage tragedies of the commons; we collectively set boundaries that stop short-term self-interest from destroying shared resources. In theory, they should work. In practice, they’re constantly under siege. At the national level, industries lobby hard to water down environmental rules, arguing that stricter standards threaten jobs, growth, or competitiveness. It’s easy to label these businesses as ‘bad actors’, but they are merely reacting to the environment they are placed in; these lobbying traits are what is left after strong natural selection.

Internationally, the challenge is even greater. Getting dozens of countries with different priorities to agree, and then to enforce the agreement, is a slow and politically fraught process. But it’s not all failure. The Montreal Protocol, which phased out ozone-depleting chemicals, shows that global cooperation can succeed when the science is clearly communicated, the threat is visible, and the alternatives are viable. Evolutionary biology has a parallel: cooperation tends to emerge when the cost of defection is so high that no player can afford it. The problem for climate and nature is that, for too many decision-makers, the costs of defection still feel far away, and the benefits of exploiting the commons are right here, right now.

Survival of the fittest? Sustainability can be the fittest strategy

So how do we re-write the evolutionary rules?

We don’t. If the tragedy of the commons rewards short-term exploitation, then our best move is to make sustainability the fittest strategy; the strategy that outcompetes all others and is favoured by natural selection. For companies, that means embedding climate-positive and nature-positive actions into the core of profitability. Cutting waste saves money. Investing in renewable energy reduces exposure to volatile fuel prices. Restoring ecosystems protects raw materials, provides adaptation to climate change as it happens, and secures ecosystem and services that supply chains depend on.

Even in the marketplace, nature-friendly branding can capture customer loyalty and attract the best employees. Not every sector will be able to align profits with planetary health. Firm legal limits are necessary, but this incentive shift can work quickly, because it speaks the language of the system as it exists today. Think of it as an evolutionary adaptation: a way to thrive now, while buying time for the deeper cultural and policy changes needed for the long game.

The danger in aligning profit with planet is that it can create a new kind of evolutionary trap. In nature, traits that work brilliantly in one environment can become liabilities if conditions change. When I was a university professor, I used to teach the classic example of beak evolution in the medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) of the Galápagos, studied in extraordinary detail by Peter and Rosemary Grant. In 1977, a severe drought left only large, hard seeds. Only birds with deeper, stronger beaks got to eat. Those birds survived far better and left offspring (who inherited these stronger beaks), so the population’s average beak size increased within just a few generations. But during wetter El Niño years on the 80s, smaller, softer seeds dominated, those large beaks became less efficient, and nimbler small-beaked birds outcompeted. The direction of selection flipped with the environment.

The medium ground finch, Geospiza fortis. Photo: Michael Dvorak, CDF.

In the same way, if our climate and nature strategies depend entirely on market incentives, they can stall or even reverse the moment those incentives change. And let’s face it: markets are notoriously hard to predict.

There’s also the moral hazard: if people believe “the market’s got this,” public pressure for tougher regulation and systemic reform can fade. That’s why aligning profit and planet should be seen as a bridge, not a destination. It buys us time, it shifts momentum, and it can prove that change is possible. Market-nature alignment must be paired with stronger laws, cultural shifts, and citizen action that lock in those gains for the long term. Otherwise, we risk evolving into a system that looks sustainable on the surface but is still headed for collapse.

Some argue that market-driven solutions will never be enough to tackle the scale and urgency of the climate and nature crisis. They point to cases where environmental gains are quickly reversed when economic conditions change, or where “green” initiatives served as a smokescreen for business as usual. They’re right to be wary - markets are as unpredictable as ecosystems, shifting direction with each new shock, regulation, or technology. It is my view is that we cannot afford to ignore this approach simply because it’s imperfect. Evolution teaches us that in a competitive environment, the strategies that survive are the ones that work under existing conditions. Aligning profit with planet may not be sufficient, but I suspect it is absolutely necessary. Market-nature alignment is, I suspect, one of the few ways to move fast enough now to buy the time for deeper systemic change. And let’s face it, we need a lot of speed.

References

Seasonal Variation in Feeding Habits of Darwin's Ground Finches

‘Tragedy of the Commons’ updated to model climate change