Rigorous analysis of opportunities to expand nature conservation can help determine where natural capital could have the biggest impact on climate, jobs, and health.
Much of the global economy depends on natural capital—the world’s stock of natural assets. Acting as the planet’s balance sheet, natural capital provides critical services and resilience. It supports water cycles and soil formation while protecting our communities from major storms, floods, fires, and desertification. By absorbing CO2, it limits the pace of climate change. Biodiversity, a core component of natural capital, supports activities as wide-ranging as pharmaceutical innovation, ecotourism, and crop pollination. These
are just a few of the numerous “co-benefits” that make nature so valuable. Yet the complexity of natural capital makes its benefits hard to quantify, leading many to overlook nature as an investment opportunity. In this report, we describe and apply a methodology that can help quantify some of the costs and benefits of conserving natural capital.
Multiple scientific studies have found that human activity is eroding the value generated by natural capital. For example, deforestation is responsible for approximately 14 percent of global carbon emissions, accelerating climate change and increasing the frequency of extreme weather events.¹ The destruction of natural marine reefs and mangroves threatens the protection of coastal human populations against storms and flooding.² At the same time, ecosystem fragmentation, habitat loss, and climate change have caused wildlife populations to decline on average by two-thirds in the past 50 years, decreasing biodiversity worldwide.³ The wildlife that remains comes in ever-closer contact with society, raising the risk of zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19.⁴
