Natural Capital, Growth, and Development

This keynote lecture from Professor Gretchen Daily was followed by a panel discussion with experts from business and academia on Natural Capital, Growth, and Development. 

Professor Daily is co-founder and Faculty Director of the Stanford Natural Capital Alliance – a global partnership whose goal is to integrate the values of nature into planning, policy, finance, and management. Its tools and approaches are now applied in 185 nations through NatCap’s free, open-source InVEST toolkit. Daily is also the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, the Director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. 

This event featured a discussion on the role of natural capital in growth and development, who the leading businesses and countries are, and the opportunities now and ahead through new data, partnerships and technologies. Professor Daily was joined by colleagues from research and business, including:  

• Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta (Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge) 

• Marie Freier (Head of Sustainability at Barclays) 

• Dr Jonathan Pershing (Dean of the Global School of Sustainability at LSE) 

• Professor Giles Atkinson (Acting Director at GRI and Professor of Environmental Policy in the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE)  

• Professor Nicola Ranger (Executive Director of Earth Capital Nexus and Professor in Practice of Natural Capital, Risk and Finance at GRI)  

The event takes place just before the IPBES-12 Business and Biodiversity Plenary in Manchester and is part of a series co-convened between Earth Capital Nexus at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, as part of the nature theme of Global School of Sustainability at LSE.