NatCap leaders reflect on 20 years

The Natural Capital Alliance, formerly the Natural Capital Project, is celebrating 20 years of pioneering science, technology, and partnerships that enable people and nature to thrive. We sat down with leaders of NatCap’s global hub at Stanford University to hear how the organization has evolved over the years and where it’s headed. We also talked about Mary Ruckelshaus’ contributions as executive director for the past 15 years, as she hands over the reins to longtime NatCappers Anne Guerry and Lisa Mandle, who will serve as co-executive directors. Professor Gretchen Daily, a co-founder of NatCap, is continuing as its faculty director. 

For more about the NatCap Alliance, read the press release.

Since its founding in 2005, NatCap has evolved from a small group of scientists and economists pioneering the field of ecosystem services into a global network reshaping how the world understands and incorporates nature’s role in human societies. Working with governments, international financial institutions, companies, and communities in more than 70 countries, NatCap supports leaders in understanding nature as an asset. Its approaches empower decision-makers to measure nature’s contributions to people and translate them into values relevant to policy and finance. 

Tell us a bit about the origins of the Natural Capital Project (now the Natural Capital Alliance!). 

Gretchen: From the beginning, we were working with and for decision-makers... the objective being a shift in policy and an injection of finance to support nature-positive outcomes -- where nature benefits and people benefit. We wanted to meld the best of a university -- the creativity of all the young scholars, the capacity to open up all kinds of new research frontiers -- with the really deep and gritty experience of the two big conservation NGOs (WWF and TNC) to offer a laboratory of practice in specific sites – in governments and other policy contexts all around the world. That is how we started off. That spirit continues, though we have embraced a much larger community of practice [including a range of other core members], just as the two NGOs have also evolved a lot. 

Tell us about NatCap’s collaborative approach of working with decision-makers and communities to co-develop solutions, and how NatCap builds and maintains trust.

Mary: I came to NatCap five years after it was founded, so in 2010. Some of my experience came from working with tribes and the U.S. government, and learning from my father [William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]. He used to say you have to “let people spill their cup.” It's just like, get it all out, whatever you need to say in the group – just spill it. Let people say their piece, because that's the first step towards building trust.

We also realized that roles must be clearly defined, and our role at NatCap is to bring information. To shine light, as we often say, on alternative futures. We are not the deciders. The people in the groups with whom we're collaborating -- they pick the future they want. 

And in a lot of places, people have been stung by being treated badly, by researchers or NGOs or others kind of swooping in and taking data, or taking credit for something and then leaving, and there's no lasting benefit. So we have to show them we mean it when we say all this. We can come from the outside with this idea about how things should work, and who should be in the room at what stage, but the people who live there have to tell you what's going to work.

Gretchen: All of this work really is a labor of love. Nobody is earning that much. It’s really hard. It involves a lot of fighting against bureaucracy in all the institutions involved. To make it worthwhile especially for our partners in different places around the world whose job descriptions don’t include working with NatCap -- there has to be a lot of trust, a lot of joy and confidence that we will do a really good job to deliver what they need to shine in their institutions. 

NatCap often helps bring together leaders from very different government or economic sectors (such as ministers of finance, central banks, etc) to work together on how nature and natural capital approaches can help all of them meet their goals. How has NatCap been able to do this effectively? 

Mary: I've just seen, over and over again, how ineffective one-sector-at-a-time kind of approaches can be.  A lot of what we're trying to do is help people find common purpose where they don't think there is one. The environment ministries might have been the first to open their doors, because maybe they have a mandate to strengthen a protected area somewhere, etc, and so you start with a small group. And then you say “Okay, what other stakeholder groups, including across government sectors, are not here?” And, we hear it everywhere, people tell you: if we want credibility in this work, we have to get the finance minister here. 

To me, the key thing when we're talking to finance ministers, and sometimes businesses too, is: what's your opening sentence? After that, it's all the same message. It's that people and nature are intertwined. And we can't live without each other. Humans need nature for many, many things. So the opening line of the pitch is often where you either grab somebody, or you lose them. 

For a finance minister, maybe it's: Belize's economy has been suffering because of COVID and its dependence on tourism, and the reason tourists come is because of the beautiful natural resources. And then you're right into nature, like in sentence number three, or whatever.

There are times where people are tense, and they raise their voices, or they have words, and then 2 or 3 meetings later, you look over and see them laughing and talking to each other. That sparks joy in me, because it's just like, okay, good: they've found their common purpose, now we can really get some work done, because those people who thought they didn't get along actually do. They have a lot in common. They're laughing at each other's jokes, or whatever their little moment is. I love that.

Anne: The whole point was asking leaders: what matters to you? And then finding ways to connect our work with that. It’s kind of a frictionless pathway to making a difference with our work. Busy people don’t have time to learn our whole schtick: they just want to see how it matters to them. And our whole reason for being is that we think nature is going to matter to them, and we just need to find the right way of talking about that that rings true for them and helps them accomplish their aims. 

One of NatCap’s key contributions is InVEST: a free, open-source platform for ecosystem service modeling, mapping, and analysis. It’s now been used in nearly every country in the world, with more than 20k downloads per year. You’ve previously been the director of science-software integration at NatCap. Tell us a little about the evolution of InVEST, behind the scenes!

Lisa: The point of our InVEST platform is largely: how can you take the science that’s been done in specific places, and through modeling, make it useful more broadly? 

When developing our models, we generally start with the questions we see decision-makers asking… the kind of information that is needed in the engagements we have. What kinds of values of nature are not being factored in, that we can help map and quantify? We go into the literature and try to see what exists there, that is not accessible to decision-makers or that is only specific to certain places. We take equations from that scientific work and turn those into software models so those relationships can be applied in any location, taking into consideration all the different factors affecting ecosystem functioning.

For example, there’s a big body of evidence that exposure to nature in cities provides a variety of different mental health benefits (we did a meta-analysis synthesizing that literature). So we asked: is there a way we can represent this relationship that lets urban planners explore how investments in green space might benefit residents? We looked at where those relationships had been well-established, especially where there was a spatial relationship that could be mapped. Then we took the equations from that literature and turned them into a model where the user could vary the specific spatial information (like where greenspaces were), and vary some of those relationships depending on context, to understand how changes in the amount and location of greenspace affects different aspects of urban residents’ mental health.  

NatCap scientists don’t generally have the expertise to turn that into software that can be run on any computer. But part of the magic of NatCap and InVEST is that it has a science foundation, but we also have a software team that can make it easy to use and replicable and well-documented.

NatCap’s work involves more than the technical analysis – it’s also about engaging in what we call the “science-policy interface.” Tell us about that. 

Mary: This work involves many steps, and we always journey together with the people who are going to actually take the actions. One thing I think we've gotten much better at over our 20 years is articulating a longer path, a longer science-policy pathway, so it doesn't stop at the technical results. Even before you start, you say: What is the policy window in your government? Is there a renewal of a specific policy coming up, or a brand new policy that needs implementation guidance? Is it a requirement to redo a zoning law, or a loan from a development bank? 

Whatever it is, it has to be identified at the top of a collaboration, because that helps you keep your eye on the near-term prize together. So there's a policy and finance window. Then you have to keep pushing, asking: how are these results going to inform that policy window, or help you land that development finance opportunity? What does that require? What due diligence do you need? Is it monitoring, reporting, and verification for a policy that needs renewal or refinement? That is how we make sure we are providing the most useful and actionable natural capital information in any given place.

How has NatCap evolved since it first began? As NatCap looks ahead to the next 20 years, where are we going next?

Anne: We used to always talk about the “demonstrations” of our approach around the world, and now we’re talking about fundamentally changing the way decisions are made. It feels like a step change: we are painting on the map instead of adding dots on the map… Now we have enough experience that we have a sense of what the pinch points are for people and what capacities to develop. Initially this was focused on how to use InVEST, on building the infrastructure. Now that we have matured, we can spend more time tailoring that and thinking about the broader systems in which decision-makers are embedded.  

Lisa:  The questions we are getting now are: “I see there is huge value in it (nature)-- what can I do about it?”  That translates into a lot more people coming to us asking for help. As there has been more interest in and demand for natural capital approaches, we need to make it easy to use within the workflows and processes they are used to and we have to make the information accessible to them. As we are thinking about scaling, we have a growing community around software that we want to help support -- we don’t want to be the bottleneck.

Gretchen: We have been working for a long time on the “emergency track,” which has been technical solutions in specific places, addressing the immediate crisis we see: the blindness of decision-making to nature. Now, we would like to open up a second path where we aim at leaders around the world who embody that conviction and experience. We can do this at our Natural Capital Symposium and in other leadership efforts around the world including through the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Natural Capital and in other arenas where proceeding on the technical front alone might not warm things up enough. This includes bringing the heart and spirit into our impact and scaling pathways, and coming together globally.  

We’re all very sad to be saying farewell to Mary, as she steps down from her role as executive director after 15 years. Tell us a little about what you’ll miss. 

Anne: I’ve been working with Mary since I was a postdoc, shortly after finishing my Ph.D., so pretty much my whole professional career! It’s going to be very hard for me to imagine work without Mary. She has been such a huge influence on me and on NatCap. The whole culture of NatCap: of focusing on the science, building trust, being good listeners, all of that has Mary’s fingerprints all over it. She embodies all of those things.

And I didn’t talk about the fun aspect! She never takes herself too seriously. It’s been helpful to have that aspect of her leadership in terms of the culture within NatCap. Mary respects the cultures of the groups we work with, while also showing up authentically and bringing in some lighthearted, natural interactions.  

Lisa: Mary leads by really supporting others in their growth and in finding ways to focus on the things they enjoy most and are strongest at... in cultivating people. It’s one of the reasons I think I’m still here after so long! She is so good at finding common ground or helping others do so, people from different backgrounds or perspectives or countries. I definitely remember my first trip to Stockholm where it felt like people were talking past each other: Mary came in and asked the right questions to bring out their perspectives to find shared language and commonalities.

Gretchen: We had worked on landscapes at NatCap before Mary joined, but we hadn’t done anything on seascapes. And then she just went so far beyond that. I’d say we all grew together, but Mary really provided so much of the vision, the ambition, the structure and operations -- Mary really led the development of that as an organization. She has this “anything is possible” spirit. I don’t think she has ever said no. Except where saying no would help us achieve more. 

Mary, can you reflect a little for us on your time with NatCap? 

Mary: This is by far the best thing I've ever done in my career, and most of it is because of the people. Of course, the people in the countries as we've been talking about, but the NatCappers too and the spirit they bring -- what they know about how to do this work with compassion, but also integrity and intellectual rigor, is really inspiring. I’m most proud of our co-creation process, and creating pathways to impact together with the people who will take the action…that's the part I am most proud of and most excited about, because I think it's the only way.

In addition to Stanford, NatCap’s core members are the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Minnesota’s NatCap TEEMs, WWF, The Nature Conservancy, and Natural Capital Insights. 

NatCap’s global hub at Stanford University is part of the Woods Institute for the Environment within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and the Department of Biology within Stanford’s School of Humanities & Sciences.