About The Natural Capital Project
Our partnership is a joint venture among Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund.
In addition to our four core partners, we work closely with experts across Stanford and Minnesota's campuses and from many institutions in the public, private and non-profit sectors.
In short, we engage leaders in key institutions and meld world-class research and development with influential, on-the-ground conservation programs.
Developing tools that make it easy to incorporate natural capital into decisions
We are developing tools for quantifying the values of natural capital in clear, credible, and practical ways. In promising a return (of societal benefits) on investments in nature, the scientific community needs to deliver knowledge and tools to quantify and forecast this return.
To meet this need, we are developing InVEST, a family of software-based tools for Integrated Valuation of Environmental Services and Tradeoffs. InVEST enables decision-makers to quantify the importance of natural capital, to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative choices, and to integrate conservation and human development.
The National Center for Ecological Assessment and Synthesis (NCEAS) has been an integral collaborator in the early development and application of InVEST, helping to make it a highly flexible and publicly available tool.
Demonstrating the power of these tools in important, contrasting places
With many partners around the world, we are using these tools to integrate scientific and economic understanding of natural assets into real land-use and investment decisions.
We are focused on national and state governments – and working with key policy makers, resource managers, scientists, and other diverse leaders in a suite of important and contrasting "demonstration projects." Our principal engagements are in Canada, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, Tanzania, and the United States (California, Hawai'i, Oregon, and Washington states).
Advancing natural capital approaches by engaging leaders in key institutions
Our demonstration projects are designed for replication and scaling. Through these projects, and by engaging leaders in key institutions, we are advancing the use of natural capital approaches worldwide. We seek a global, deep, and game-changing transformation in how governments and businesses factor the values of nature into policy and decision-making.
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From theory to practice
We have made rapid progress since our inception in November 2006 toward our first two goals (developing tools and demonstration projects). While significant work remains to achieve these, we have now moved beyond the start-up phase and are planning to take on exciting challenges in magnifying our impact.