For much of humanity’s existence, the world’s rivers, oceans, and forests have been treated as free — and as resources to draw from without tallying their worth. In many countries, that’s meant a global economy built on nature’s extraction, where ecosystems are undervalued and overused in the pursuit of growth.
But increasingly, the concept of natural capital is being used to flip that script — reframing nature not as an expendable resource, but as an asset class of its own. By assigning value to the services ecosystems provide, natural capital aims to shift economic decisions toward protection and restoration rather than depletion.
The problem? No one has settled on a way to actually value nature, or to integrate that value into their balance sheets. And without doing so, attempts to integrate natural capital into economic planning risk inconsistency and misuse.
“We’re a bit in the crunch point,” said Martine van Weelden, a director at Capitals Coalition, speaking during the Building Bridges conference in Geneva, Switzerland — a three-day event that brought nearly 2,000 people from the private and public sectors together to discuss sustainable finance.
“On the one hand, we have the current economic system where pricing is what we do, and what we look at,” van Weelden continued. “And on the other hand, we see nature, and we see that our economic system doesn't adhere to the natural systems that provide us with the economy that we have.”
About the author
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
