Why Recognising Natural Capital Is Not Enough
Over the past decade, the idea of natural capital has moved steadily closer to the centre of global conversations about sustainability, finance and the future of the economy. That is a good thing.
Institutions such as the World Economic Forum and many others working in the natural capital space have helped push an essential idea into the mainstream: Nature is not external to the economy. It underpins it.
Why recognising natural capital is not enough has gradually become a central question in my own work.
Forests regulate water cycles. Soils support food production. Biodiversity underpins resilience. Stable ecosystems make economic activity possible in the first place. If that sounds obvious, it is only because it should always have been obvious. Yet our economic models were not built that way.
Over time, I have come to believe that recognising natural capital is essential — but not sufficient.
Natural capital recognition is an important step forward — but not enough on its own.
The problem is not only that Nature is undervalued.
The problem is that even when we begin to recognise Nature’s value in reports, frameworks, or accounting systems, that recognition does not necessarily change the value signals guiding everyday economic choices.
The grocery store moment
This realisation did not come to me through a white paper.
After nearly two decades in environmental organizations, I had already lived through many of the hard realities of this work: running out of funding, saying goodbye to talented colleagues, and even struggling to pay my own rent.
But the moment that truly broke me happened somewhere far less dramatic than a climate summit.
It happened in a grocery store.
I was standing there holding $4 local apples in one hand and $2 imported bananas in the other, and suddenly realised something deeply uncomfortable:
my principles didn’t align with my paycheck.
That moment stayed with me because it made the structural problem brutally tangible. If the economy really valued ecological responsibility, that choice should have felt easy. Instead, the price signal was pulling in the opposite direction.
That is when the question sharpened for me:
What if the problem is not that people do not care about Nature — but that the system makes care economically difficult?
What natural capital thinking gets right
The natural capital movement gets something profoundly important right. It challenges the absurd idea that economic value begins only when something is extracted, sold, or priced in a market.
It says, correctly, that healthy natural systems generate enormous real value — whether or not current accounting systems capture it.
This is why efforts to integrate natural capital into public decision-making, corporate reporting, finance, and accounting matter. They help make visible what traditional indicators such as GDP or quarterly profit can obscure.
I see this as an important step forward.
But I also see a limit.
Where I see the gap
Much of the current natural capital conversation focuses on measurement, valuation, disclosure, financial integration and better decision-making at institutional level.
All of that is useful. But recognition alone does not automatically change behaviour.
Modern economies are driven by signals:
prices guide consumption,
returns guide investment,
profits guide corporate decisions,
wages and purchasing power guide daily life.
If those signals remain largely unchanged, natural capital can be recognised on paper while the real economy continues rewarding short-term extraction more reliably than long-term regeneration.
This is why one of the central insights in the Theory of Change behind My Drop in the Oceans is that, in today’s economy, the default instruction is often:
Make money first, then (maybe) think of Nature.
That sequencing matters because it turns stewardship into economic risk. Businesses, consumers and institutions that move first to protect natural systems often incur costs that others can avoid.
In plain terms: responsibility becomes asymmetric.
That is why progress remains difficult even when awareness is high.
From accounting to incentives
This is where my own work has gradually taken a slightly different direction.
For more than fifteen years, through My Drop in the Oceans, I have been exploring a question that sits just beyond natural capital accounting:
How do we translate the recognition of natural capital into economic incentives?
The answer I keep returning to is that if natural systems represent shared foundational wealth, then the economy needs mechanisms capable not only of measuring that wealth, but of circulating its recognition in ways that affect real decisions.
This is the logic behind what I call a Citizen’s Dividend for Nature.
The idea is not to artificially create new value. It is to make the real economic value generated by healthy natural systems visible and economically legible — and to ensure that this recognition influences behaviour.
In that sense, the difference is important.
Natural capital accounting asks:
How do we recognise Nature’s value in our models, accounts and decisions?
The next question — the one I have spent years focused on — is:
How do we make that recognition matter in the real economy?
Why this led to mydio
mydio.com emerged as one practical attempt to explore this question.
The ambition was never simply to build another loyalty platform or another “green” consumer proposition. The deeper question was whether everyday transactions could begin to reflect the value of eco-responsible choices more directly.
Could the economy start acknowledging stewardship in ways that are tangible to ordinary people? Could it begin to reduce the gap between what is good for Nature and what feels affordable or rational in daily life?
That is the bridge I have been trying to build:
from natural capital recognition
to economic participation
to incentive alignment.
In that sense, I do not see this work as opposing the natural capital agenda. I see it as trying to help operationalise it.
Why this matters to me personally
I did not arrive at this through abstract theory alone. I arrived at it through years of environmental work, through collaboration with local communities, through watching how ecological damage is often paid for by those with the least power, and through repeatedly seeing how disconnected consumer prices can be from real ecological cost.
That grocery store moment stayed with me because it captured the whole contradiction in one scene.
We often ask people to make the “right” choice while leaving the system that shapes the choice largely unchanged.
Then we act surprised when progress remains slow.
This is also why I wrote COP29 and the Grocery Store Philosopher. The story may sound personal, even slightly humorous at moments, but the underlying point is deeply serious: if sustainable choices remain less accessible than unsustainable ones, systemic change will remain more rhetorical than real.
If you want to explore related reflections, you can also browse other essays on this site or return to my personal work more broadly.
Recognition is essential. But it is not enough.
I welcome the growing momentum around natural capital. I believe it marks an important shift in economic thinking.
But I also believe the next frontier is not recognition alone.
It is translation.
Translation from ecological value into economic signals.
Translation from accounting into incentives.
Translation from theory into participation.
If Nature is truly foundational wealth, then sooner or later the economy will need to reflect that not only in balance sheets and disclosures, but in the incentives that organise everyday life.
That is the work I have been trying to articulate more clearly through the Theory of Change.
And it is why I continue to believe that another economic logic is possible — one in which stewardship is not priced as sacrifice, but increasingly recognised as value.