Natural Capital Initiative

Organising Partners

The NCI is a partner of the International Year of Biodiversity

About us

The organising partners of the Natural Capital Initiative are the Society of Biology, Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the British Ecological Society.

Climate change and population growth force us to consider how best to use and preserve the dwindling services provided by the environment on which we rely.

The Natural Capital Initiative is:

Informing the Government's implementation of the ecosystems approach - a framework for looking at whole ecosystems in decision making and valuing the services they provide.
Identifying gaps in science, policy and implementation that inhibit an ecosystems approach.
Working with government, parliament, agencies, NGOs, the private sector, scientific bodies and the wider public.

The link between the health of our environment and the health of our economy is becoming clearer. But we don’t yet understand the true value of all the services the environment provides us with – the natural capital so vital to our well-being. This means we can’t make well-informed decisions about how to manage the environment.

For example, farmers produce high volumes of vegetables, fruit, grains and biofuels - which contribute to our economy - using fertilisers and pesticides. Conventional economics tells us the value of the agricultural end products, but not the cost of the process to environmental goods and services such as clean water or the control of pests by natural predators.

The economic value of reducing greenhouse gases in our atmosphere is better understood. Many businesses now evaluate which operations they need to continue that pollute the environment and which they can change. The emissions trading programme is responsible for this change. It allocates a certain number of carbon credits to businesses and if they don’t use them all, they can sell them to other companies. However, if they use more they are fined by the European Union.

There is a need to start understanding the value of other services the environment provides us with and develop frameworks that let us make better-informed decisions. This is something the UK Government has recently committed to – it’s called the ecosystem approach.