Gretchen Daily named a 2024 Climate Action Leader
Business Insider today announced Gretchen Daily, co-founder and faculty director of the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project (NatCap), as one of its 2024 Climate Action Leaders. Inclusion on the list recognizes Daily and the NatCap team’s global leadership and innovation in developing both the science needed to quantify nature’s benefits to people, and the engagement with companies, governments, and international financial institutions needed to incorporate nature's values into their decisions – and sustain those benefits.
“Our work at NatCap is reaching a critical moment: our approach is being mainstreaming by international financial institutions and governments worldwide, and now there is rapidly growing interest from the private sector," said Daily. "It’s a terrific honor to be highlighted this year in the Business Insider list alongside these other innovators and visionaries.”
The announcement comes soon after the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on Biological Diversity (COP16), and just as the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) begins. NatCap’s work motivating cross-sectoral investments in nature is key to addressing the intertwined nature and climate crises. When it comes to climate, nature is an essential focus for both mitigating and adapting to climate change: nature can store vast amounts of carbon, create rainfall, reduce urban heat, and shield communities from sea level rise and flooding. And the biodiversity crisis itself threatens to compound the impacts of climate change by putting additional pressure on food systems due to loss of soil, pollinators, and marine ecosystems, to name a few factors.
Daily and colleagues at NatCap have been working for nearly two decades to rectify this “fatal flaw in our economic systems -- their blindness to nature -- before it kills us,” as Daily sometimes says. NatCap’s tools and approaches help assess alternative development and resource management choices, and identify where investment in natural capital can enhance both human development and the ecosystems underlying it. NatCap collaborates with partners across sectors to create and incorporate this information into policy and finance mechanisms that enable more strategic growth and long-term prosperity. InVEST, NatCap’s suite of ecosystem services software, has been used in >185 countries, and NatCap has worked directly in >70 countries.
Natural capital approaches inform many areas of decision-making, including disaster risk reduction, multi-sector development planning, sustainable agriculture, payment schemes for ecosystem services, enhanced tourism, innovative finance mechanisms, nature-based solutions for climate resilience, and urban planning.
What is natural capital and why does it matter? The world’s ecosystems are a type of capital asset: if well-managed, Earth’s lands, waters, and biodiversity provide vital benefits that sustain and fulfill human life. If not well-managed, these benefits are costly to replace.
See the NatCap website for more information on how these approaches are helping to address the challenges posed by nature loss and climate change. To see the full list of 2024 Climate Action Leaders, see the Business Insider announcement.
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NatCap is based out of Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability and its Woods Institute for the Environment, as well as the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences’ Department of Biology. It is a global partnership of interdisciplinary researchers, professionals, and leaders: its core partners are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the University of Minnesota, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. NatCap’s work is co-created and implemented through a network of more than 500 collaborators worldwide.
