What are examples of natural capital?

What are examples of natural capital?

Examples of natural capital include: minerals; water; waste assimilation; carbon dioxide absorption; arable land; habitat; fossil fuels; erosion control; recreation; visual amenity; biodiversity; temperature regulation and oxygen. Natural capital has financial value as the use of natural capital drives many businesses.

What is meant by natural capital?

Natural capital are natural assets in their role of providing natural resource inputs and environmental services for economic production. Context: Natural capital is generally considered to comprise three principal categories: natural resource stocks, land and ecosystems.

Is there a natural capital?

Natural capital can be defined as the world’s stocks of natural assets which include geology, soil, air, water and all living things. It is from this natural capital that humans derive a wide range of services, often called ecosystem services, which make human life possible.

What are the components of natural capital?

Abiotic natural capital comprises subsoil assets (e.g. fossil fuels, minerals, metals) and abiotic flows (e.g. wind and solar energy). Biotic natural capital or ecosystem capital consists of ecosystems, which deliver a wide range of valuable services that are essential for human well-being.

What type of natural capital is soil?

Soil is essentially a non-renewable resource and is fundamentally one of the Earth’s most important natural capital assets. Soil’s most widely recognised function is supporting plant growth, whether for crops, trees or native habitats.

Is soil a natural capital?

One of the results of this integration is the concept of soil natural capital (SNC). SNC is defined as the permanent flows of energy and materials, which based on physical, chemical and biological processes lead to soil formation (Berrouet et al., 2018).

What is non-renewable natural capital?

Non-renewable natural capital includes mineral deposits and fossil fuels, which provide financial rents but do not generate direct services. 1. Both types of natural capital provide people with exploitable resources (Petersen and Gocheva 2015).

Is all natural capital renewable?

Natural capital consists of all renewable and non-renewable resources, as well as processes from the environment that provide products or services. Natural capital is also an economic metaphor for the limited stocks of natural materials, land and ecosystems; in other words natural assets.

How is water a natural capital?

Natural capital is the stock of physical natural assets — it is simply everything that nature gives us for free, such as water, soils, forests and biodiversity, and which provides a benefit such as pollinating crops, natural hazard protection or by facilitating climate regulation.

What are the three elements that make up natural capital?

According to the OECD, natural capital is “natural assets in their role of providing natural resource inputs and environmental services for economic production” and is “generally considered to comprise three principal categories: natural resources stocks, land, and ecosystems.”

What is the role of sunlight in ecosystem?

The two most important climatic factors for ecosystems are sunlight and water. Sunlight is necessary for plants to grow, and to provide energy to warm the earth’s atmosphere. Light intensity controls plant growth. At the other maximum, some plants and animals only survive by being submersed in water.

Why is soil considered a natural capital?

Soil connects to water and air, and natural biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, and is a major global reservoir of biodiversity. By interacting with all these components, soils represent a natural capital that provides services of fundamental importance for human well-being (Figure 1).

Why does the word sun have a capital letter?

That’s why it has a capital letter.) There’s Only One Sun! Even though people regularly use “star” and “sun” interchangeably when discussing astronomy, only our star is called The Sun. Therefore, it could be argued that the word “Sun” should always be capitalized because it is always a proper noun.

Where does a lot of natural capital come from?

A great deal of natural capital is in the tropics — that’s where many of the world’s biggest natural repositories of carbon, wildlife and fresh water are (think rainforests, wetlands and the like). This represents a bulk of the “trust fund” — or stocks — from which we can identify how dividends flow to a range of users.

When do you capitalize the sun, moon, and Earth?

We usually lowercase sun, moon, and earth, but, following The Chicago Manual of Style, when the does not precede the name of the planet, when earth is not part of an idiomatic expression, or when other planets are mentioned, we capitalize earth: The earth revolves around the sun.

Who are the companies that support natural capital?

Developed jointly by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Conservation International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and others, the Protocol already counts the support of 50 major companies, including Coca-Cola, Dow, Hugo Boss, Kering, Nestle, Roche and Shell, Portela says.