Natural Capital

Understand the value of natural assets and ecosystem services.

Nature offers an abundance of resources vital to our sustenance and well-being. Defining the natural capital value (i.e., attaching a dollar value to ecological resources) using tools, metrics, and frameworks will help organizations make informed business decisions that balance economics, nature, and people. While assigning economic value to biodiversity may be tricky, when done with due diligence and the right set of tools and expertise, it can result in sustainable, nature-positive results as well as a valuable decision-making framework for creating long-term value.

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Discover Our Services

Featured Capabilities

We help clients across sectors, regions, and industries quantify the natural capital impacts of projects through a range of diverse services built on experience and technical capabilities. We help you optimize your business decisions through our natural capital services, realize ESG-conscious projects, and achieve long-term profitability.

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Optioneering

Through optioneering, WSP helps you factor in project impacts on natural capital and ecosystem service provision in your decision-making process around biodiversity conservation and enhancement goals. We support you in understanding and quantifying the natural capital impacts of design and planning and investment options using assessment tools designed and developed to plan and systematically assess the likely impact of proposed options.

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Natural Capital Protocol

Using a standardized framework (i.e., Natural Capital Protocol), we help you identify, measure and value impacts and dependencies on natural capital for projects operating in any geography, at any organizational level and any business sector, thereby allowing you to make science and data-based investment and project decisions that will enhance your portfolio and ensure sustainable operations.

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Natural Capital Accounting

Measuring and valuing natural capital can help you make better natural asset management decisions. Understanding the natural capital value of land holdings allows you to establish a baseline value for ongoing monitoring and reporting of the condition of natural assets using a standard approach. At WSP, we provide a range of natural capital accounting and environmental cost-benefit analyses that enable you to understand, measure and value natural capital.

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Ecosystem services assessment and valuation

We bring a multidisciplinary approach to assessing and valuating ecosystem services. This allows for a comprehensive description and mapping of ecosystem services provided by natural and modified habitats comprised in studied areas, as well as the needed understanding of the beneficiaries’ level of dependency to the services. Further, we assign value to identified ecosystem services and provide management strategies aligned with the mitigation hierarchy and propose solutions designed to offset negative impacts on ecosystem services and compensate beneficiaries when required.

Clients we help

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Mining, Resource & Industry

We help you navigate rising demands for resources that enable sustainable objectives to materialize in tandem with the call for ESG-conscious operations by helping you to understand and quantify the natural capital impacts of projects. Subsequently, we guide you to make informed decisions based on the data attained to design and implement projects to produce nature-positive and financially profitable outcomes.

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Investor & Private Equity Firms

Our experts will support you to make better investment and business decisions based on the economic costs of human activity and development in specific habitats and biodiversity. We review all biodiversity aspects of a project, helping you evaluate the complexity and feasibility of projects and determine their level of safety, security and assurance.

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Forestry & Agriculture

We can help you identify, measure and value your project’s impact on natural capital in response to evolving regulations and mandates due to growing concerns over climate change and biodiversity loss.

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Energy Providers & Utilities

Working with us, you will be able to apply a natural capital approach to understanding the inter-dependencies between nature, people, the economy and society to incorporate the value of nature into your decision-making process, avoiding the often hidden costs of ecosystem degradation that leads to biodiversity loss.