Capital
A User's Guide.
Natural Capital: A User's Guide.
A book for anyone trying to understand what nature finance actually is, how it got here, and where it might be going.
A long-form introduction to natural capital that assumes no prior knowledge of finance, investment, or capital markets. It starts with the question of why a civilisation built systems that forgot to count their foundations, and ends inside the rooms where those systems are now being rebuilt.
Six parts. Twenty chapters plus a preface and afterword. Roughly sixty thousand words. Published here, on Ground Truth, one chapter at a time, free.
The whole arc.
Six parts. The first half builds the foundations: what natural capital is, where it came from, and how it learned to count itself. The second half walks the markets, the integrity questions, the money, and the wider politics.
- 01 The invisible economy. Live
- 02 The price of everything. Coming
- 03 Nature's balance sheet. Coming
- 04 Counting what counts. Coming
- 05 The carbon proof of concept. Coming
- 06 Beyond carbon. Coming
- 07 The unit problem. Coming
- 08 Supply. Landowners, farmers, restoration. Coming
- 09 Demand. Who buys nature, and why. Coming
- 10 The intermediary layer. Coming
- 11 Stacking, bundling, and the art of making the numbers work. Coming
- 12 Additionality. The most important word you've never heard. Coming
- 13 Permanence. Why a thirty-year promise might mean nothing. Coming
- 14 Greenwash, and the limits of the market. Coming
- 15 The capital stack. Coming
- 16 Risk. Policy, methodology, ecology. Coming
- 17 Returns. What it actually looks like from the inside. Coming
- 18 Nature finance and the state. Coming
- 19 The global picture. Coming
- 20 What good looks like. Coming
- A A note from inside the work. Coming