A senior European Central Bank official has declared that the climate emergency and the breakdown of nature are a growing threat to the global economy. In other news, water is wet.

Frank Elderson, a member of the ECB's executive board, announced that the eurozone's lender of last resort is stepping up its monitoring of financial risks tied to the destruction of 'ecosystem services' - nature-related processes or assets that support human activity. You know, the stuff we actually need to survive.

'These services are not stable but they are in rapid decline. That's why we talk about the climate and nature crises,' Elderson said, adding: 'Knowing that dependency, and knowing those exposures by the banks, we come to the conclusion that this is relevant.'

As Europe burns - literally - with wildfires raging across France and Spain amid record-breaking temperatures, torching land, businesses, and homes, the economic cost is becoming impossible to ignore. The human toll is bad enough, but the financial hit is apparently what gets the suits' attention.

In an interview with the Guardian (conducted before the current devastation, because timing is everything), Elderson noted that the rising frequency of natural disasters linked to global heating poses a clear threat to financial stability. He stressed that more work is needed to assess risks from collapsing ecosystem services, since mapping our dependence on nature is trickier than tracking a single extreme weather event.

'Ecosystem services' include anything we get from natural structures or processes: water as raw material, hydropower, transportation, habitats for marine life that feeds us, and even the basis for recreational services. So basically, everything.

'Nature-related risks can pose material economic and financial risks, including through their impacts on credit risk, growth, inflation and - over the long-term - potential financial instability,' Elderson said.

He's been saying this for a while: 'I did interviews saying, you know, if you destroy nature, you destroy the core on which our economies depend. And that got people's attention. This is not some kind of a flower-power, tree-hugging exercise. This is core economics. This is core financial stability, core price stability.'

In his role as supervisor of Europe's largest banks, Elderson has launched a programme to assess how escalating damage to ecosystem services could expose the financial system. The ECB plans to publish analysis later this year on how 'ecosystem degradation pathways' could translate into credit loss dynamics for eurozone banks. Because nothing says 'credit loss dynamics' like a scorched earth.

Elderson, a Dutch lawyer and central banker, helped create the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) in 2017 with Mark Carney and François Villeroy de Galhau, then chiefs of the Bank of England and Banque de France. He was founding chair of the group of 114 global central banks and financial supervisors pushing climate risk management.

The green agenda has faced pushback under US President Donald Trump, who pulled the US out of the NGFS last year, leaving Europe to lead without the world's most powerful economy. Because of course.

Despite this, Elderson insists the banking industry is convinced climate and nature risks must be addressed. 'I would think it's very difficult to find a bank in Europe that will honestly tell you that they think this is not relevant,' he said. 'I think that time has passed.'

Let's hope he's right, because the alternative is too depressing to contemplate - even for us.