The Natural Capital Project: Making conservation mainstream
November 14, 2006
A shrimp fisherman pulls in his net in a area of wetlands and coastal mangroves managed for shrimp production in the Reserva de la Biosfera la Encrucijada near the town of Salto De Agua; Chiapas, Mexico.
© Mark Godfrey/TNC
A coral reef aswarm with ocean life. A honeybee busy over a flower. A forest standing silent guard over a river. These everyday sights of nature bring us joy, wonder and comfort. But can we quantify the benefits they give us—not only aesthetic, but also economic? In a world with so much poverty and hunger, how can we justify paying so much attention to conservation and the environment?
The answer is simple: human well-being depends on the services and assets that nature provides for free. Humans depend on ecosystems for clean water, fertile soils, food, fuel, storm protection and flood control. But key decision-makers such as governments and industry rarely incorporate the value of these services into their resource and development decisions. This neglect results in sustained and significant environmental, habitat and species losses every year.
The Natural Capital Project—a new 10-year partnership among The Nature Conservancy, WWF and Stanford University—is designed to help key decision-makers incorporate the value of these benefits into their conservation and development decisions.
Launched last month, the Project is developing finance and policy mechanisms as well as mapping and other decision-support tools that, together, can help the world secure its natural assets both for people and for nature.
The vision of the Project is a future in which conservation is mainstream—that is, economically attractive and commonplace throughout the world. We need to make consideration of ecosystem services routine, so that their value is part of all land and resource-use decisions and that there is long-term financing available for future delivery of these services.
What is Natural Capital, Anyway?
The Natural Capital Project is focused on living natural capital assets—ecosystems that, if properly managed, yield a flow of vital services. Relative to other forms of capital, natural capital is poorly understood, rarely monitored and, in many cases, undergoing rapid degradation and depletion. Often, the tremendous importance and economic value of natural capital is appreciated only upon its loss.
The partnership draws on the intellectual capacity and academic network of Stanford University as well as the real world, on-the-ground experience of the Conservancy and WWF’s conservation practitioners. The Project will cover the entire ecosystem service process—from mapping and valuation to actual decision-making with policy levers and financial mechanisms. Its major thrusts will include:
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Providing tools (such as sophisticated mapping) that help decision-makers protect biodiversity and secure full ecosystem services;
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Catalyzing new ecological science that better links land-use decisions to quantifiable changes in the delivery of ecosystem services; and
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Developing new financial, market and policy instruments that fund the protection of ecosystem services in a fair and credible manner.
Broadening the Lessons Learned
The Project will first apply these tools in a strategic set of demonstration projects in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains, China’s Upper Yangtze River Basin and California’s Sierra Nevada Region. Once we demonstrate effectiveness in our three initial areas, we aim to select and add four to six additional sites, including marine habitats.
Each new project should force us to develop new insights and create a portfolio of demonstration projects that can be tailored to local conditions and cultures everywhere.
By demonstrating the power of this approach, providing the tools needed to replicate it elsewhere and communicating effectively to governments, the private sector and the general public, we aim to improve ecosystem management practices worldwide.
Once we develop standard accounting systems and valuation approaches for ecosystem services, private finance will have a creative and growing role to play in conservation—to make sure no one can deplete natural capital without somehow investing in its replenishment and long-term equity.
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