About The Natural Capital Project
A joint venture among The Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund.
The Problem: Destroy nature and you lose human life-support systems
Forests purify water and air; coral reefs nurture fish. We know this all too well - so why is nature still losing out to markets that value trees more when they’re cut and sold as timber, or floodplains when developed as strip malls?
We believe it’s because of the lack of economic forces on behalf of nature. Traditional ways of calculating Gross Domestic Products consistently omit the trillions of dollars of benefits that nature provides, and on which our lives depend. The first victims of this glaring accounting error are the world’s poorest people, who live closest to nature and most harshly experience its degradation. Yet ultimately no one is immune from global threats including climate change, loss of pollinators, and depleted fisheries.
Our Solution: Ecosystems valued as precious natural assets
Imagine now a different kind of world: a world of greater economic realism, where societies would manage ecosystems like the precious natural assets they are. This is the world envisioned by The Natural Capital Project, a new and unprecedented partnership between The Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. The Natural Capital Project, launched 31 October 2006 in Washington, D.C., aspires to provide maps of nature’s services, assess their values in economic and other terms, and - for the first time on any significant scale - incorporate those values into resource decisions.
Achieving this vision will require new scientific methods, new financial instruments, and new governmental policies. The Natural Capital Project will work toward providing all three, combining the strengths of one of the world’s leading research universities and two of the world’s most experienced and effective field conservation organizations.
Developing New Tools for Decision-Makers
Our first tool, InVEST, models and maps natural capital: the delivery, distribution, and economic value of ecosystem services and biodiversity.
The National Center for Ecological Assessment and Synthesis (NCEAS) has been an integral collaborator in the early development and application of InVEST, helping to make it a highly flexible and publicly available tool. Future tools include innovative policy approaches, including private markets, to motivate and finance conservation.
Working at Field Sites
With many partners around the world, we are bringing to life the promise of this way of reframing our vision of nature, applying understanding of natural assets and ecosystem services as a part of land-use and investment decisions.
>>Read more about Where We Work
Magnifying Our Impact
By engaging decision-makers, from local leaders to government officials to financial professionals, the impact of these on-the-ground projects are magnified.