Ever since the Industrial Revolution, nature has been in retreat—equally undervalued by economists, accountants, engineers and politicians. But now a new revolution is building. Later this year, Pavan Sukhdev, a former Deutsche Bank managing director, will unveil the findings of the Teeb study—the acronym stands for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. The focus of the research is the creation of what we call the Biosphere Economy.

This time the economy will be working with the grain of the biosphere, rather than against it. And business opportunities created by the shift will be huge. The Teeb analysis suggests that the degradation of Earth's ecosystems and biodiversity caused by deforestation alone costs us natural capital worth between $1.9trn (£1.25trn) and $4.5trn (£3trn) every year.

Meanwhile, extraordinary new insights are flowing from the leading edge of ecosystems science. We know that tropical rainforests act as freshwater pumps. Cut down the Amazon, we are told, and rainfall will decrease not only in South America's trillion-dollar agricultural hubs, but also as far away as China.

As Mikkel Kallesoe of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) says: "The concept of ecosystem services is more tangible for business than biodiversity. We are talking about freshwater, crops, pollination, fibre and erosion regulation. These units fit with other inputs in a business model and a production process."

Some global business leaders sense that disruptive change is coming. Earlier this year, chief executives of 29 global companies involved in WBCSD—including Alcoa, Boeing, Syngenta, Sony, E.ON, Procter & Gamble and Volkswagen—unveiled their Vision 2050 study. They forecast a future in which market pricing accurately reflects the ecological costs of doing business.

Dream on, you may say, but later this year Trucost, a firm providing environmental valuations to business, will publish a report concluding that the 3,000 biggest public companies had "ecosystem liabilities" of $2.2trn (£1.48trn) in 2008, representing more than 30 per cent of their combined profits. Once markets absorb and act on such information, everything will change.

John Elkington is co-founder of SustainAbility and Volans (www.volans.com)