Natural capital

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Natural capital is a metaphor for minerals , plants and animals in the biosphere , insofar as they are viewed as a factor of production for the production of oxygen, as a water filter , guardian of erosion , carrier of genetic material or other natural services. In this context, an attempt is made to capture the economic value of the ecosystem, which goes beyond the traditional understanding as a passive natural resource .

Analogy to the concept of capital

The term natural capital is a metaphor because, analogous to the concept of capital in current economics, it evaluates natural resources in a different way. Robert Costanza , Amory Lovins , L. Hunter Lovins , Paul Hawken and other proponents of the natural capital theory do not count natural resources as the production factor soil , because they can be significantly disturbed and destroyed by human activities and thus a “capital” of nature is destroyed. The natural output is already too low to absorb the consequences of current economic practices (cf. biocapacity and ecological footprint ).

Costanza defines natural capital functionally as “a stock of natural ecosystems that provides a stream of valuable ecosystem goods and services.” In this perspective, natural capital is a stock quantity . The associated river size are the ecosystem services and environmental or natural goods .

A narrower term is biocapacity . This sub-category of natural capital relates to the regenerative capacity of ecosystems, i.e. to the biological side of natural capital.

Use of the concept

The concept of natural capital is used to develop welfare measures (cf. Comprehensive wealth ) or, in general, to expand the national accounts to include environmental accounts . It is important to record natural capital stocks and, if necessary, to subject them to an environmental-economic assessment . Here non-renewable natural capital forms an important basis for resource economics .

The value of a natural capital stock is often thought of as the present value of all future stock-dependent utility streams. In order to capture the economic costs of a change in the natural capital stock, the expected flows ( ecosystem services ) and the associated shadow prices must be estimated. These depend, among other things, on the current income distribution and the expected distribution between the generations.

Critical Natural Capital

As Critical Natural Capital (CNC), dt. Critical natural capital is called the stock of natural capital or concrete natural capital goods (eg. Clean water or clean air), which is essential for human survival. The concept is based on the assumption that there is a “critical threshold” for many natural capital goods ( ecosystem services ), below which they become “essential” in the economic sense, ie they cannot be substituted . Accordingly, CNC cannot be evaluated economically, since environmental economic evaluation is strictly based on the assumption of substitutability.

literature

  • Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, and Paul Hawken: A Road Map for Natural Capitalism. In: Harvard Business Review May – June 1999, pages 145–157, ( natcap.org PDF).
  • Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins: Collapse or Circular Economy. Growth along the lines of nature. Siedler Verlag, July 2001, ISBN 978-3-88680-604-1 .
  • Beate Jessel, Olaf Tschimpke , Manfred Walser: Productive force of nature. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2009 ( bfn.de PDF).
  • Pushpam Kumar (Ed.): The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Ecological and Economic Foundations . Routledge, London, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-84971-212-5 .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Costanza: Natural Capital. In: Encyclopedia of the Earth. July 31, 2008, accessed January 23, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Jasper Meya, Moritz Drupp , Stefan Baumgärtner , Martin Quaas : Inter- and Intragenerational Distribution and the Valuation of Natural Capital . 2018 ( PDF ).
  3. ^ Paul Ekins, Carl Folke, Rudolf de Groot: Identifying critical natural capital . In: Ecological Economics . tape 44 , no. 2–3 , 2003, pp. 150-163 , doi : 10.1016 / S0921-8009 (02) 00271-9 .
  4. ^ Joshua Farley: The role of prices in conserving critical natural capital . In: Conservation Biology . tape 22 , no. 6 , 2008, p. 1399-1408 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1523-1739.2008.01090.x .