The Stanford Natural Capital Alliance (NatCap) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have collaborated on several new, complementary resources available in Spanish and English – a free Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) and an online Implementation Toolkit -- to support applications of natural capital approaches around the world. These approaches integrate nature’s benefits to people into decisions, helping to address major development challenges, like water, food, and energy security, and sustainable livelihoods. The team is launching these resources during several events this week at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Yerevan, Armenia.
The new resources distill lessons from the People, Planet, Prosperity (3Ps) project, a collaboration between NatCap, IDB, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and the World Bank, into practical materials other countries, finance institutions, companies, and consultants can adapt and apply. The 3Ps project included 16 pilot countries in which the work directly informed policy and investment decisions with evidence about return-on-investments in nature.
A new synthesis report is also available sharing outcomes from across the pilot projects, focused on the 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Asia-Pacific region that NatCap worked on with IDB and ADB. This portfolio of projects is influencing $1.6 billion in financing, primarily through informing where funds can best support outcomes for people and nature.
***Across 10 countries, the pilots co-developed and used natural capital evidence to inform more than 12 national laws, plans, and financing instruments across ~10 sectors, from wetland zoning in Uruguay and biodiversity offsets in Chile, to watershed investments in Sri Lanka and natural capital accounting in the Philippines.
The free, self-paced 20-hour online course ( English | Spanish ) and the toolkit ( English | Spanish ) give officials and practitioners guidance for identifying their own policy windows and applying these approaches for integrating nature’s value to their own contexts.***
From pilot projects to global mainstreaming
In one of these pilots, over the past two years, a team with representatives from the Uruguay Ministry of Economy and Finance and the Ministry of Environment, and the Stanford Natural Capital Alliance, worked together to collaboratively develop an assessment of the diverse values Uruguay’s wetlands provide. This was timed to coincide with a specific window of opportunity for informing implementation of its wetland conservation policy. Wetlands generate significant economic benefits: the team evaluated a set of three ecosystem services and estimated their annual value at approximately $223 million, driven primarily by carbon storage and flood protection. This is equivalent to a national average of $401 per hectare of wetland/year, three times the market rental value of Uruguay’s agricultural land. The work also helps show which wetlands provide the greatest value, and to whom, which the government can now use to target conservation funds. Learn more .
But the story doesn’t end there. The way the team conducted its work was just as important as the technical outputs. Much of the analyses were done through a mix of online and in-person training and workshop sessions, which developed the local team’s capacity to produce natural capital assessments on their own.
In parallel, the NatCap and the IDB collected and designed materials from across the pilot projects to support others around the world in assessing and valuing the benefits nature provides to countries and communities, lowering the barriers for using these approaches. Learn more about these materials below.
At COP 17, the team will participate in two events showcasing this work, a panel on October 27 at 10:00am in the Global Environment Facility Pavilion on “Natural Capital for Development,” and a technical workshop on October 29 at 11:30am focused on content from the MOOC and Toolkit.
***More about natural capital approaches
Natural capital approaches provide a structured way to understand and demonstrate the values of nature – making ecosystems and the services they provide more visible in the policies, investments, and decisions that shape development outcomes. When done well, they can transform how governments and others manage natural resources and build resilient communities and economies. They can inform diverse contexts including regulatory instruments like zoning; economic instruments like payments for ecosystem services, green subsidies or biodiversity offsets; public/government investments including green infrastructure; and private or international finance.
At the core of any natural capital approach are assessments that map, measure, and value natural assets and the ecosystem services they provide. These use scientific, spatial, and economic tools along with quantitative and qualitative data to quantify how ecosystems contribute to water security, climate regulation, food production, disaster risk reduction, and cultural well-being. Informing decisions is integral to natural capital approaches, and thus they typically include embedding technical experts within or alongside government planning teams. Learn more .***
More about new tools for applying natural capital approaches
There is no single right entry point to these new resources. For those newer to this field of work, the Toolkit includes introductory materials , which can be followed by exploring the new self-paced online course . For those already familiar with the concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services, and ready to plan a project, there’s a How-to Guide and other implementation tools including worksheets for scoping an assessment and template “Terms of Reference” for hiring additional experts. For those looking for inspiration or wanting to understand what impact looks like in practice, the case studies are a good place to start.
Media contact: Elana Kimbrell, elanak@stanford.edu