Sustainability reporting

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.