Welcome to The Natural Capital Review
by the Natural Capital Alliance
Our Vision and Purpose
Since its founding in 2005, the Natural Capital Alliance (formerly the Natural Capital Project) has evolved from a small group of scientists and economists into a global network, reshaping how the world understands and incorporates nature’s role in human societies. With our hub at Stanford University, NatCap includes core collaborators around the world, as well as on-the-ground work with governments, communities, companies and other organizations in more than 70 countries.
We help leaders view nature as an asset, measuring nature’s contributions to people and translating them into values relevant to policy, finance, and decision-making. This publication extends this work.
Understanding nature as ‘natural capital’ is, most simply, a way of framing Earth’s lands, waters, and biodiversity as a vital asset that people rely on. In doing so, we place it alongside other forms of capital that drive decisions: manufactured, human, social, financial. Recognizing nature in this way makes our dependency on it visible in the realms of policy and economics, adding logic and evidence to what we already know in our hearts: that we must measure, manage, and steward it with care.
For much of recent history, economists were seen as promoting unbridled growth, and ecologists as calling for conservation over livelihoods and local communities – the two perspectives often positioned as irreconcilable. This publication helps tell the story of why and how the practice of integrating natural capital and ecosystem services into policy and finance has emerged as a uniquely powerful way to bridge this perceived gap, and provide readers with real-world examples of its application being put to use around the world.
On this platform, you’ll find concise explainers and videos on the science and software underpinning these approaches. You’ll also find human-focused narratives, exploring what motivates people from across sectors to work together and to use natural capital approaches as solutions to the challenges we face.
We follow the interconnected story of mangroves, coastal communities, and the Blue Bonds designed to sustain them in Belize. We explore how local communities in the Cook Islands have identified the most important places to invest in ecosystems to reduce downstream water pollution and inform infrastructure planning. We investigate the trade-offs between the economic benefits of tea plantations in Sri Lanka and the costs of their soil erosion. We are interested in how a high-level, cross-government committee focused on natural capital in Chile is changing everything about the way the country values nature.
Our coverage is both global and highly local. Our editorial challenge is this: how does this story (this reef, this river basin, this municipality, this individual person) reveal something crucial about the future of sustainable development, nature finance, strategic governance, or societal resilience? With actors and institutions that have historically been considered external to the environmental conversation now getting involved, we cover the complexities of role of the private sector, central banks, development institutions, and finance ministries.
Like the best magazines, our aim is to surprise, inform, and occasionally inspire. While we dive deeply into this complicated mosaic of community collaboration, scientific and policy innovation, ecology, and economics, we never lose sight of the urgency of this moment for our planet.
All of our content is free, and we publish approximately weekly. Those who subscribe gain access not only to our archive but also to the peer-reviewed research that underpins it, along with key updates to our tool like InVEST, our flagship open-source software platform that makes mapping and valuing ecosystem services, nature’s benefits to people, possible and widely accessible.
What You’ll Find in Our Pages
The Exchange: We engage in conversations with our collaborators around the world. We ask ecologists, economists, bankers and private sector leaders, government ministers as well as local people, fishers, farmers, and Indigenous communities, tough questions about how they use, understand, and approach natural capital.
In the Review, our long-form reporting takes a deep dive—these stories trace the who, how, where, and why of natural capital approaches being implemented around the world. From watershed management and coastal resilience to urban cooling and national development plans, they connect why a finance minister might suddenly dig into sediment retention or how a local community can contribute to GIS mapping of their ecosystems. In every case, we are interested in how natural capital approaches have brought once-unlikely coalitions together and what real-world results come from these collaborations.
Software & Modeling: A key component of our work is InVEST®, a free, open-source platform of ecosystem service models and tools that quantify and visualize the benefits ecosystems provide to people – like food, clean water, flood protection, recreation – so they can be made visible in real decision contexts. This column keeps you up to date on advances in our software and tools and provides a space to grow the community of contributors in the ecosystem services field who are making and using these tools.
Key Concepts & Applications: For those newer to the world of natural capital, this column serves as a touchpoint for the core ideas, tools, and approaches shaping the field. We see this as a way to level the playing field so we are all talking the same language, and explore the many different disciplinary lenses and lingo that come together under this umbrella.
Stay in Touch. If you know of natural capital or ecosystem services-related news, or work that deserves our attention, please email our editors, Zoë Ellis Wilson and Elana Kimbrell: naturalcapitalalliance@stanford.edu
The Natural Capital Alliance welcomes you. Please keep reading!
Wicked good piece, looking forward to more!