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.

Our way of conducting business has outgrown our planet. Our organizations contribute on a massive scale to depleting natural resources, destroying ecosystems, changing the climate, exhausting water reserves and precious topsoils. We are playing a game of brinkmanship with the future, betting that more technology will heal the scars modernity has in

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