Natural Capital Management: An Evolutionary Paradigm for Sustainable Restoration Investment - 13455

Unlike other forms of capital assets (built infrastructure, labor, financial capital), the supply of usable or accessible air, land, and water elements (termed Natural Capital Assets or NCA) available to enterprise processes is structurally shrinking due to increased demand and regulatory restriction. This supply/demand imbalance is affecting all forms of public and private enterprise (including Federal Facilities) in the form of encroachment, production limits, cost increases, and reduced competitiveness. Department of Energy (DOE) sites are comprised of significant stocks of NCA that function as both conserved capital (providing ecosystem services and other reserve capacity), and as natural infrastructure (supporting major Federal enterprise programs). The current rubric of 'Environmental Stewardship' provides an unduly constrained management paradigm that is focused largely on compliance process metrics, and lacks a value platform for quantifying, documenting, and sustainably re-deploying re-capitalized natural asset capacity and capability. By adopting value-based system concepts similar to built infrastructure accounting and information management, 'stewarded' natural assets relegated to liability- or compliance-focused outcomes become 're-capitalized' operational assets able to support new or expanded mission. This growing need for new accounting and management paradigms to capture natural capital value is achieving global recognition, most recently by the United Nations, world leaders, and international corporations at the Rio+20 Summit in June of 2012. Natural Capital Asset Management (NCAM)TM is such an accounting framework tool. Using a quantification-based design, NCAMTM provides inventory, capacity and value data to owners or managers of natural assets such as the DOE that parallel comparable information systems currently used for facility assets. Applied to Environmental Management (EM) and other DOE program activities, the natural asset capacity and value generated by EM projects and other investment and operational programming can be recorded and then allocated to mission and/or ecosystem needs as part of overall site, complex, and Federal decision-making. NCAMTM can also document post-restoration asset capability and value for use in weighing loss mitigation and ecosystem damage claims arising from past operational activities. A prototype NCAMTM evaluation developed at the Savannah River Site (SRS) demonstrates use of this framework as an advanced paradigm for NCA accounting and decision-making for the larger DOE complex and other enterprise using natural capital in operations. Applying a quantified value paradigm, the framework catalogues the results of activities that sustain, restore, and modernize natural assets for enterprise-wide value beyond that of compliance milestones. Capturing and assigning recapitalization value using NCAMTM concepts and tools improves effective reuse of taxpayer-sustained assets, records ecosystem service value, enables mission and enterprise optimization, and assures the sustainability of shared natural capital assets in regional pools vital to both complex sites and local and regional economies. (authors)