Pro­fes­sor Dieter Helm, Chair­man of the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Com­mit­tee, has released ‘Nat­ural Cap­i­tal – valu­ing our planet’, a book pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­sity Press and fol­low­ing closely the rec­om­men­da­tions of the Nat­ural Cap­i­tal Com­mit­tee in its recent report to the UK gov­ern­ment.

GDP, the con­ven­tional mea­sure of eco­nomic growth, does not involve a proper bal­ance sheet, and the future con­se­quences of deplet­ing nat­ural cap­i­tal are ignored, such that deplet­ing nat­ural assets typ­i­cally leads to an increase in GDP.

At the heart of this book is an asset-based sus­tain­able nat­ural cap­i­tal rule: pass­ing on to the next gen­er­a­tion a set of assets at least as good as the ones we inher­ited requires a num­ber of con­di­tions to be met and a line in the sand to be drawn — the aggre­gate level of nat­ural cap­i­tal should not decline. This requires that nat­ural cap­i­tal is incor­po­rated in national and cor­po­rate accounts, mea­sured, and val­ued to make sure that the aggre­gate rule is not broken.

To meet the aggre­gate rule, the eco­nomic rents from deplet­ing non-renewables should be set aside in a fund, which is poten­tially very big, cre­at­ing sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve nat­ural capital.

Pro­fes­sor Helm rec­om­mends three poli­cies nec­es­sary to imple­ment the nat­ural cap­i­tal approach to eco­nomic pol­icy: com­pen­sa­tion; envi­ron­men­tal taxes, sub­si­dies and per­mits; and the pro­vi­sion of nat­ural cap­i­tal pub­lic goods, includ­ing pro­tected areas, parks and nature reserves.

Com­pen­sa­tion is at the heart of the aggre­gate nat­ural cap­i­tal rule. To ensure there is no decline, there needs to be com­pen­sa­tion for any phys­i­cal dam­age within the aggre­gate. Along­side the fund for deple­tion of non-renewables, this could result in a colos­sal con­ser­va­tion programme.

This infor­ma­tion was retrieved from the lat­est (May 2015) BBOP Newslet­ter.

Read more (includ­ing reviews and pos­si­bil­i­ties to order the book) here and some infor­ma­tion on the con­tent and the author pasted below. See also a related Youtube video.

Con­tent of the book

Nat­ural cap­i­tal is what nature pro­vides to us for free. Renewables—like species—keep on com­ing, pro­vided we do not drive them towards extinc­tion. Non-renewables—like oil and gas—can only be used once. Together, they are the foun­da­tion that ensures our sur­vival and well-being, and the basis of all eco­nomic activ­ity. In the face of the global, local, and national destruc­tion of bio­di­ver­sity and ecosys­tems, econ­o­mist Dieter Helm here offers a cru­cial set of strate­gies for estab­lish­ing nat­ural cap­i­tal pol­icy that is bal­anced, eco­nom­i­cally sus­tain­able, and polit­i­cally viable.

Helm shows why the com­monly held view that envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion poses obsta­cles to eco­nomic progress is false, and he explains why the envi­ron­ment must be at the very core of eco­nomic plan­ning. He presents the first real attempt to cal­i­brate, mea­sure, and value nat­ural cap­i­tal from an eco­nomic per­spec­tive and goes on to out­line a sta­ble new frame­work for sus­tain­able growth. Bristling with ideas of imme­di­ate global rel­e­vance, Helm’s book shifts the para­me­ters of cur­rent envi­ron­men­tal debate. As inspir­ing as his trail­blaz­ing The Car­bon Crunch, this vol­ume will be essen­tial read­ing for any­one con­cerned with revers­ing the head­long destruc­tion of our environment.

About the author

Dieter Helm is Fel­low in Eco­nom­ics, New Col­lege, Oxford. He is also Pro­fes­sor of Energy Pol­icy and Pro­fes­so­r­ial Research Fel­low, Smith School of Enter­prise and the Envi­ron­ment, Uni­ver­sity of Oxford. He lives in Oxford­shire, UK.

Read More: www.naturalcapital.wix.com/dieterhelm and see Dieter Helm’s blog.