Dow Chemical is working with The Nature Conservancy to determine Dow's impact, and dependency upon, ecosystem services. The Natural Capital project is supporting the work and helping them achieve their objectives (including enhancing benefits that accrue to both Dow and their neighbors in the community). We are evaluating the costs and benefits of using "green infrastructure," such as coastal marshes, for coastal hazard mitigation instead of, or in conjunction with, traditional "grey infrastructure" alternatives such as building sea walls.   

The Natural Capital Project is forming a partnership with Unilever to determine how land-use changes will affect their commodity targets, other ecosystem services, and biodiversity. For example, as Unilever explores switching from using petroleum products to those made with biofuels, our approach can help them understand the impact changes in land-use resulting from their consumption decisions would ultimately impact biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services.. They are particularly interested in this information on ecosystem services so that they can incorporate it into life-cycle analysis for their products.  

The Natural Capital Project is also participating in the TEEB Business Coalition, where we are working with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW) and  our partners at the World Wildlife Fund. The Coalition is conveneing businesses to discuss what they want and need from natural capital evaluations, and to agree on standard approaches for assessing their impacts. We hope to identify what businesses want so we can tailor our tools and future research to fit their needs.

The Natural Capital Project co-sponsored the Inclusive Wealth Report 2012, with the UN, released at Rio+20. The report provides a path forward on how countries can implement environmental accounting into measures of national wealth, and illustrates how inclusive wealth could be a better and more comprehensive indicator than GDP to assess the wealth of a country. This approach represents a crucial step in transforming the global economic paradigm to growth models explicitly valuing environmental
health and social well-being. The Inclusive Wealth Report  is a joint initiative of UNU-IHDP and UNEP in collaboration with the UN-Water Decade Programme on Capacity Development (UNW-DPC) and the Natural Capital Project. A chapter in the Report, Inclusive wealth accounting for regulating ecosystem services,  was written by Heather Tallis, Steve Polasky, Juan Sebastian Lozano, and Stacy Wolny, all affiliated with the Natural Capital Project. The chapter illustrates how we can start to do national-scale accounting of ecosystem services, even in developing countries with poor data.