Natural Capital for Development

Inter-American Development Bank via Coursera

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Provider

Coursera
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

5 weeks, 2 hours a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English

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Overview

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This course has been developed through a collaboration between the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Stanford University’s Natural Capital Alliance, with funding from the Global Environment Facility. This is a self-paced course with a total duration of 20 hours. Throughout the MOOC, you'll build four core competencies. First, you'll understand nature as an asset, recognizing ecosystems as capital that generates critical flows like clean water, climate regulation, coastal protection, and human well-being. Second, you will learn how to integrate the natural capital approach into decision-making through key entry points. Third, you will understand the process of conducting a Natural Capital Assessment through practical examples. Finally, you will analyze how natural capital accounting uses assessment results to inform public policy and investment decisions. Drawing on cases from Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions of the world, this course connects you to a global community of practitioners and equips you to bring these tools into your own institution or territory. Nature is a strategic asset for sustainable development—and you can play a key role in integrating it into decision-making.

Syllabus

Module 1: Mainstreaming Natural Capital – The Foundations
- Welcome to the first thematic module of the course. This module introduces why nature matters for economic development and why integrating natural capital into decision-making is essential for resilience, prosperity, and equity. You will explore how biodiversity and ecosystems underpin human well-being and economic activity, and how their degradation creates growing risks for governments, businesses, and communities. The module explains how nature functions as a form of capital, alongside financial, human, social, and built capital, and why ignoring it has led to hidden costs and rising vulnerabilities. The module presents key global and regional trends in biodiversity and ecosystem decline, examines the economic drivers of environmental degradation, and shows how economic activities both depend on—and impact—natural systems. Through practical examples, you will learn how these feedback loops affect sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure, energy, and finance, and increase risks for development. You will also examine why nature is often missing from economic and financial models, and how natural capital approaches help bridge this gap by making ecosystem values visible, measurable, and usable in policy, planning, and investment. This foundation prepares you for the concepts, tools, methods, and case studies introduced in later modules.
Module 2: Including Nature in Decisions
- In this second module, you will explore how natural capital approaches can transform decision-making across governments, public institutions, and the private sector by embedding sustainability into development and finance strategies. Throughout the module, you will learn why it is essential to measure and quantify ecosystem services, and integrate their value into public policies, investments, and planning processes. The content presents concrete examples of policy instruments and financial solutions that align individual and institutional interests with broader societal goals for the protection and sustainable use of nature. This module will guide you through the main opportunities and challenges for incorporating nature into decision-making, from identifying key stakeholders to designing incentives and mechanisms for collaboration. You will learn to distinguish between different types of policy and financial instruments, and to identify strategic moments (“entry points”) to influence plans, budgets, policies, and regulations.
Module 3: Natural Capital Assessment
- The module explains what a natural capital assessment is, why it matters, and how it can be used in decision-making contexts such as public policy, spatial planning, infrastructure investment, resilience, and conservation. It emphasizes that these assessments make the value of ecosystems and their services visible and actionable for decision-makers. The module presents practical tools and examples, such as spatial modeling and economic valuation methods, and highlights the importance of collaboration among sectors, local communities, and policymakers. The second part of the module includes several case study examples from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and other countries, showcasing natural capital assessments in different decision-making settings and entry points. Each case study offers a snapshot of cross-sectoral and interinstitutional collaboration, as well as local and regional innovation, to incorporate nature into policy and investment decisions. Collectively, these projects provide insights not only into the variety of specific applications, but also into how natural capital approaches can be expanded across sectors and regions, from local to national levels.
Module 4: Natural Capital Accounting
- This module describes the theory and practice of natural capital accounting in more detail. It builds on the ecosystem assessments described in Module 3, illustrating how these assessments can be integrated to build more robust and informative natural capital accounting.
Closing - Engaging with Natural Capital Assessments and Accounting