Rethinking Nature As Economic Climate Capital – And A Really Valuable Investment

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

Or support our Kickstarter campaign!

We hear a lot about sea level rise and the effects it is having on coastal communities. The media sometimes morbidly plays and replays footage of homes collapsing from their high cliff footings into the pounding surf. As someone who is lucky enough to live at the beach, I’ve tried to play a part in educating communities about nature-based attempts to secure our borderline against the relentless ocean rise.

For my own neighbors, that means a mature dune, salt- and drought-tolerant plants, and constant removal of invasives.

Not everyone, of course, sees a dune as an investment. Weren’t our fondest childhood memories of going to the beach filled with images of looking out a motel window to a flat sandy beach and the white frothy waves? A dune, honestly, interrupts that endless visual vista as it grows in height and width as it captures wind-blown sand.

A new book helps us to revise these types of comparable oppositional views about nature — views that have prevented us from reconciling economic growth and our planet’s vitality.

In Climate capital: Investing in the tools for a regenerative future, Tom Chi argues that our economy can be aligned with the processes that support the biosphere and still continue to diversify, be resilient, and be adaptable to changes and shocks. Natural and economic wealth would rise and fall as long as “the planet remains habitable in an astrophysical sense (at least a billion years).”

As someone who runs a venture capital firm that focuses on helping humanity to become a net positive to nature by reinventing the industrial economy to be compatible with — or generative to — nature,” Chi explains that there is “critical work to avoid mass extinction included the expansive effort of technically upgrading our most damaging industries to be compatible with a healthy planet.”

But that work is doable, he insists, if western nations rethink the way they value nature, so that “managing the wealth of the bioregions could be a point of national investment and pride.”

Why Changing the Climate Trajectory isn’t Actually Too Expensive

The Google X co-founder starts his new book with the basic facts that the big dangers from climate change are from the widening range between the upper and lower bounds that the temperature can reach at different times in a year. That wide temperature range affects many organisms, which can have limited ability to function well when the highest highs and lowest lows increase in intensity.

Nature is just another form of capital is at the heart of the climate crisis, Chi describes.

We are, and always have been, capable of increasing the carrying capacities of the lands of which we are a part. Rather than seeing an equation in which it is “too expensive to address the changes to atmosphere and climate,” he reframes the thinking into a paradigm in which “we are passing into the era where it is too expensive to not address climate destabilization.” To do so, “we should aim to become a net positive to the health of nature as a whole,” which would come from being a net positive across air, water, soil, and biodiversity.

Chi understands the power of algorithms in today’s society and the role of social media in suppressing climate action. “I am colleagues with a number of the folks who developed the major social media services and their dopamine-loop exploring algorithms and interactive designs,” he explains. “I’ve seen that industry stoke geopolitical chaos, and in a way, this things working as intended. The algorithm’s goal was engagement, not political stability, scientific accuracy, or public benefit.”

As a mechanism to value a natural landscape for the value of its environmental services and natural capital, Chi says that the capitalistic algorithm “will absolutely drive the demolishing of that natural system if something of greater economic value can be wrung from that same landscape.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Western nations don’t have to endorse a “capitalistic efficiency algorithm doesn’t care about the function of natural systems.” Replacing sole focus on improving margins and scaling production — economic endeavors which “often sever essential connections that then destabilize the metabolisms of natural systems (biology and hydrology)” —  western nations can foreground the value of nature as a new ideology.

What does this look like, according to Chi?

One core way to break the frame is by “recognizing that protecting nature is less about finding a few lots to fence off from human interference and more about upgrading our economic thinking to include the reality that land and natural resources are finite, and, given their scarcity, we should maximize their value.”

• It begins by recognizing targeting the expensive production side of a business. That’s when “our economic system views this as a supply-side efficiency improvement.”
• Businesses look around at their immediate surroundings and recognize that everything the economy has helped to produce “is either mined or grown, which means it came directly from nature, no exceptions.”
• An inversion of values and aesthetics begins, in which “wildly different possibilities in terms of how humans are meant to interact with nature” starts to make sense.
• Next comes an epiphany that “the wealth of ecosystems is accrued over time, in layers of topsoil, in healthy hydrology, and in biology that expresses itself in self-stabilizing ecosystems with optimal biodiversity in every available habitat on the planet.”
• This effort requires supporting the health of keystone species, which are defined as species that have disproportionately large impact toward establishing ecosystems with better carrying capacity for diverse nutrient flows.
• Accounting for how many organisms benefited from a particular change is next, as is assigning more value of reward to the actors in an economy that are building products, services, and/or government programs that benefit more organisms for the same resources.

Chi then reexamines this thinking into the language of finance to ground nature-based in terms that make sense for a capitalist economy.

1. The individual units of land that people manage is “M.”
2. The area not managed by people is “U.”
3. Area (land) = the sum of all managed and unmanaged lands.
4. Value (area) = value M + value U, or, to say it in another way, the value of all lands, “a value we should maximize as we are on a planet of finite area.”

“The economic task is not to maximize the value of each managed unit M, and we can also monitor the value improvement to units of U, as nature can and does accumulate natural wealth in its process of being.”

We’re up to the task of strengthening the health of key flows of water, nutrients, and engineering systems that create more time and utility, Chi argues, if “new equipment brings better unit economics alongside better ecological economics through lower energy use or more skillful material use.’

But “we can’t get there with a core framework of extraction and exploitation.” Instead, a rethinking of wealth that comes from benefiting as many organisms as possible “with each proton and accumulating wisdom for future generations from what these organisms have created and learned for us” is key.

There’s a lot more to this book, and I recommend reading it.

Resource

Climate capital: Investing in the tools for a regenerative future. Tom Chi. Joe Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2026.