Deepening collaborations, scaling up benefits for people and nature
The Natural Capital Alliance (NatCap) announced today that three new institutions are formalizing their participation in the global collaboration, as it marks 20 years of valuing nature in decisions: the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as international financial institution (IFI) collaborators, and the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont as a research member. The announcement coincides with the 2026 Natural Capital Symposium being held at Stanford University this week.
“Bringing in our first new institutions since transitioning from the ‘Natural Capital Project’ to the ‘Natural Capital Alliance’ is an exciting milestone,” said Anne Guerry, NatCap co-executive director. “We’ve worked with all three for many years and look forward to finding new ways to leverage our respective strengths to innovate and scale up natural capital approaches globally.”
IDB and NatCap have worked together for nearly 15 years in countries across the Latin America and Caribbean region. This next step reflects their commitment to continuing the work they’ve initiated in these countries beyond initial funding periods. The two institutions have co-developed and refined both technical approaches and science-policy pathways that embed nature’s benefits to people into policies and mechanisms that incentivize or finance more sustainable development. Earlier projects included incorporating natural capital information into road planning and investments, and innovative loans in the Bahamas that used natural capital assessments as loan performance indicators (e.g., showing changes in ecosystem services provided by nature in specific areas as evidence of successful outcomes).
"Building on more than 15 years of collaboration, our partnership with Stanford demonstrates the power of connecting science to decision-making” said Gregory Watson, Unit Chief, Biodiversity and Natural Capital at the IDB. “Bridging analytics and action helps ministries of finance and national planning institutions embed nature into economic strategies and drive more resilient development.”
Most recently, both the ADB and IDB collaborated with NatCap through the People, Planet, Prosperity initiative to mainstream natural capital approaches across 10 countries (as well as six additional countries through the World Bank BELA program). IDB and NatCap’s joint work was funded by the Global Environment Facility and included developing a new massive open online course (MOOC), Natural Capital for Development: Valuation, Investment and Policy, and an Implementation Toolkit for Scaling Natural Capital Approaches -- which just launched this week.
ADB and NatCap similarly have worked together for many years in the Asia-Pacific region, leading up to the People, Planet, Prosperity project and continuing in newer work as well. In the 3Ps project, teams worked across five ADB member countries to develop nature-centered solutions to development challenges ranging from improved watershed management to implementing new Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) accounts.
In a recent Q&A on the NatCap website and Substack, ADB’s Narayan Iyer talks about embedding their new natural capital framework into ADB operations to scale up nature investments and mobilize sustainable finance for nature – noting the work with NatCap helped in “demonstrating the potential of upstream assessments in project design.”
The Gund Institute for Environment is an interdisciplinary research accelerator based at the University of Vermont that partners with government, business, and society to connect science with real-world impact. Taylor Ricketts, director of the Gund Institute and professor at the Rubenstein School of the Environment and Natural Resources, was one of the co-founders of NatCap while at WWF.
“The Gund Institute is thrilled to be joining the Natural Capital Alliance as a research member,” said Ricketts. “This move formalizes two decades of ongoing collaboration between researchers at NatCap and the Gund. Teaming up makes sense — both organizations work to reconnect nature and people so both can thrive. I’m looking forward to broader collaborations and impacts ahead.”
Research teams supported by the Gund Institute are leading on a variety of projects including a U.S. network of statewide climate impact assessments, working with NGOs and development organizations to quantify the health impacts of nature conservation, partnering with Vermont's agricultural agency to design, evaluate, and improve their payment-for-phosphorous program, developing microsensors to monitor water quality at a tiny fraction of typical cost, working with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and farmers to develop Vermont’s first map of soil health, and devising new metrics of prosperity and well-being that account for natural capital. This work involves a range of ecosystem services that are also of central interest to NatCap, including carbon sequestration, water purification, flood mitigation, crop pollination, soil health maintenance, infectious disease regulation, stress reduction, and cultural connection to nature.
Moving forward
NatCap plans to continue expanding its ranks gradually over time, filling out different needs and niches that strengthen both the collaboration and the efforts of others doing aligned work.
In addition to the three new institutions, NatCap’s global hub is at Stanford University; its other core institutional members are the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics (at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Research and implementing members are the University of Minnesota’s NatCap TEEMs, Natural Capital Insights, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. NatCap also works with a global network of hundreds of institutions in the public and private sectors who collaborate on research, implementation, and scaling of natural capital approaches.
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