1. Introduction
Recognising Australia’s natural resources as assets can help drive investment that sustains the country’s food security and biodiversity.
The widespread adoption of innovative and sustainable land practices relies on measuring and valuing environmental ‘assets’ to encourage the adoption of best practices. ‘Natural capital’ has both financial and non-financial value, it encourages sustainable land practices. There is already an extensive knowledge base and capability amongst farmers and their representatives, government, the research community, and intermediaries including natural resource management (NRM) organisations. But there isn’t currently a comprehensive and consistent set of natural capital measures to support widespread adoption of natural capital measurement across Australia.
What we’re doing
As part of Climateworks’ Land Use Futures initiative, two priorities were identified by stakeholders for enabling widespread measurement of natural capital: creating a comprehensive set of natural capital measures and options for incentivising natural capital measurement at the property level. The Natural Capital Investment Initiative is focused on helping to create the tools and resources to support farmers and land managers across Australia efficiently measure their natural capital.
2. How we'll get there
3. Resources
Natural capital measurement enabled by new reference catalogue
Editor’s note 28/10/2024: Version 2.0 of the Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue, with updated functionality and features, was released in October 2024.
Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue
The Natural Capital Measurement Catalogue helps integrate natural capital considerations into business, financial and government decision-making, by facilitating convergence on a core set of consistent and comparable natural capital metrics that can be measured across all scales and different land use types.
Aligning our work on the natural capital measurement catalogue with the global Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures
This week, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) released the final prototype of its beta framework. Driven by a need to make nature visible in decision-making, the TNFD has emerged as a framework for businesses to act on nature-related risks and opportunities. The TNFD is a voluntary, market-led approach that will see companies quantifying the dependencies and impacts of their activities on nature. The framework is currently being developed by a global network of 40 representatives, with a consultative group of over 900 institutional supporters, from financial institutions, corporations and market service providers.
There’s no path to net zero without nature
Our recent Briefing Room event explored the relationship between land use and nature.
The briefing room: The twin challenge of tackling climate change while preserving nature
To limit warming to 1.5°C we need global emissions reduction as scale.
Building Australia’s natural capital
Responding to audience questions during our recent Climateworks webinar, the second article in our series outlines the challenges and benefits to measuring our natural assets and the services they provide. Our world’s natural areas are under significant threat as demand for land for agriculture and urban development rises.
Natural capital investment initiative – Phase 1 report
Globally, there is increasing recognition of the importance of protecting and restoring nature in order to mitigate climate change impacts.
Natural Capital Investment Initiative to accelerate, thanks to a multi-year funding commitment
Agriculture businesses working to improve natural capital, while reducing emissions, will be able to test common measurement frameworks and new incentives under the next phase of the Natural Capital Investment Initiative, which has secured three years of funding from the Macdoch Foundation.
Land use futures publishes natural capital roadmap
The Natural Capital Roadmap presents the ideas of over 300 leaders in farming, forestry, natural resource management, conservation, finance, policy, research and government on how to progress the natural capital agenda in Australia.
Land use futures team hosts natural capital summit
In early June 2019, the Land Use Futures team – working with NAB and the Queensland State Government – ran the Natural Capital Summit, as part of ClimateWeek QLD 2019.
