natural capital

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the stock of natural assets — including geology, soil, water, air, and living organisms — from which humans derive a range of ecosystem services essential to economic activity and human wellbeing; coined as a counterpart to manufactured capital and human capital, the natural capital framework seeks to make the economic value of nature visible in accounting systems that traditionally treated environmental resources as free inputs; quantifying natural capital enables cost-benefit analyses that incorporate environmental degradation, supports biodiversity net gain requirements in planning law, and underpins the growing field of natural capital accounting used by governments and corporations to measure sustainability