Internal Nature Pricing: overcoming the challenges of corporate natural capital accounting

Most corporations fall short of the capacity, time, and funding for comprehensive Corporate Natural Capital Accounting (CNCA) at enterprise scale. Methods that exist tend toward a weak sustainability approach that permits continued growth of liabilities and value erosion beyond the enterprise boundary, rather than aligning with strong sustainability principles that treat critical natural capital as a non-negotiable constraint and genuinely reduce nature-related risk. Simplified entry points are urgently needed.

This paper surveys progress to date and proposes a progressive CNCA implementation pathway: beginning with a rapid GDP-proportional 'Earth Fee' as an accessible first step that enables immediate mitigation allocation, building toward sector-specific and site-level analysis, and ultimately toward full value-based analysis of nature-related dependencies, impacts, and risks. The urgency of nature loss demands action with imperfect methods rather than delay in pursuit of perfect precision.

Three levels are proposed, ranging from a simple fee on revenue weighted by the overall nature impacts of a given sector to a deep analysis on supply chain dependencies, with a mezzanine level between the two. A literature review explores the history of CNCA and frameworks proposed previously, and concludes with 6 formulas that corporate stakeholders could use to create company-wide fiscal policies to support nature-positive action.