We need to value natural capital | Greenbiz

INVESTING IN NATURAL CAPITAL. This works toward reversing worldwide planetary destruction through reinvestments in sustaining, restoring, and expanding stocks of natural capital, so that the biosphere can produce more abundant ecosystem services and natural resources.

Natural capital includes all the familiar resources used by humankind: water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil, air, et cetera. But it also encompasses living systems, which include grasslands, savannas, wetlands, estuaries, oceans, coral reefs, riparian corridors, tundras, and rainforests.

The

global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. 

Second, valuing natural capital is a difficult and imprecise exercise at best.

We need exponentially less of the degenerative forms of capitalism and exponentially more of the increasingly resilient and regenerative forms.

first, we reach a collective, politically mediated agreement on the right amount of nature to turn toward human purposes: how much of the produce of the sea, how much of the soil, the water; how much of the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb and transform waste; how much of the land’s ability to recover from the scars of mineral extraction; how m

“sustainable growth has to be focused on a. functionality not a product,” and that “the next major step toward sustainable growth is to improve the value of our products and services per unit of natural resources employed”—that

It is urgent to start accounting for and governing natural capital and ecosystem services, not just for saving the environment but for the sake of our own development.