Why Nature Needs an Accountant.

A note before we begin

Some of the people in this book are real and appear under their own names. Others are composites, or have had identifying details changed, because the point of their stories is what they illustrate rather than who they are. Where I describe specific legal disputes, market transactions, or project outcomes, the details are drawn from real events but have in some cases been adjusted to protect the privacy of individuals and organisations involved. The landscapes are all real. The economics are all real. The people are real in the ways that matter.

I should also be transparent about where I stand. I work in natural capital. I am employed by Restore, an ecological restoration company that manages land across England and Scotland, and my job involves designing and selling the kinds of products that this book examines. I have a professional stake in the success of these markets, and the reader should weigh that accordingly. I have tried, throughout, to be as honest about the failures and limitations of the field as about its promise, but the reader is entitled to know that the author is not a disinterested observer. No one writing about natural capital in 2026 is.

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Why Nature Needs an Accountant.

I spent fifteen years directing wildlife and expedition films, BBC, Netflix, National Geographic, PBS, the kind of work where you spend nine hours in a hide waiting for something with feathers to do something interesting, and then, if everything goes right, you get forty seconds of footage that might make the final cut. It was a good life. It involved a great deal of mud, a reasonable amount of travel, and an unusually intimate acquaintance with the gap between what the natural world actually looks like and what it looks like on television.

What it did not involve, for most of those years, was any serious engagement with economics. I could identify two hundred British bird species by song. I could not have told you what a biodiversity credit was, or why anyone would want one, or what it might have to do with the planning system. Finance was something that happened to other people in buildings with better heating.

That changed. It changed because the places I had spent my career filming, the wetlands, the woodlands, the upland bogs, the coastal margins where life concentrates, kept getting smaller, quieter, and less alive, in ways that were visible not just across decades but across seasons. And it changed because I began to understand that the forces driving that decline were not primarily ecological. They were economic. The birds were disappearing because the economics of the land they depended on had been arranged, for three hundred years, to make them disappear. No one had set out to do it. The system had done it, quietly and efficiently, because the system could not see what it was destroying.

When I moved from filmmaking into the natural capital sector, joining an ecological restoration company, learning the language of credits and units and capital stacks and compliance markets, I discovered two things simultaneously. The first was that the emerging framework for valuing nature economically was genuinely important: a serious, intellectually demanding attempt to make the invisible visible, to give the living world a voice in the one language that capitalism reliably listens to. The second was that almost no one outside the field understood it. The subject was buried under a thicket of acronyms, specialist vocabulary, and institutional complexity that made it nearly impenetrable to the intelligent, interested reader who had not spent years inside it.

This book is an attempt to fix that.

It is not a policy manifesto. I am not arguing that natural capital markets will save the world, nor that they are a corporate conspiracy to privatise nature. Both positions exist, and both contain grains of truth, but neither is adequate to the complexity of what is actually unfolding.

Nor is it a textbook. There are no equations, no problem sets, few footnotes. The academic literature on ecosystem service valuation, ecological economics, and environmental finance is vast, sophisticated, and largely unread outside universities.

What it is, instead, is an attempt to explain a genuinely important subject to an intelligent reader who has not spent years studying it, and to do so without either talking down to that reader or hiding behind the fog of specialist vocabulary. The subject is important for a reason that goes beyond environmental concern, though environmental concern is entirely reasonable. Natural capital is becoming a new frontier of finance. It is generating new asset classes, new regulatory frameworks, new professional roles, and new investment strategies. It is reshaping the way that land is valued, the way that corporations account for their dependencies on nature, and the way that governments think about the relationship between economic growth and ecological health. Whether you are a landowner, an investor, a policymaker, a business leader, or simply someone trying to understand what is happening to the world, the ideas in this book will, within the next decade, become unavoidable.

There is a translation gap at the heart of this subject. The people who understand natural capital most deeply, the ecological economists, the market designers, the policy architects, tend to write for each other. The people who most need to understand it, the landowners, the investors, the policymakers, the voters whose choices will determine whether these markets succeed or fail, are reading something else entirely. Fifteen years of making films about the natural world taught me, if nothing else, how to explain complicated things to people who have not spent their careers studying them. This book is an attempt to do that for a subject whose complexity has, until now, been one of its biggest obstacles.

I begin where all good accounting should begin: with what we have, and what we have been failing to count.