Shaping the Future of Natural Capital Accounting

Sue Ogilvy is a researcher and practitioner of natural capital accounting who is passionate about supporting farmers to balance productivity, profitability and sustainability.

Her research has focused on whether financial accounting concepts and standards can be applied, adapted and extended to enable farmers to include ecosystems (natural capital) as part of their asset base. She has published in environmental accounting and food security literature as well as in general literature exploring the opportunity to support sustainability-conscious markets to establish a virtuous cycle of causally linked improvements in environmental and economic performance of livestock producers. Her vision is of development of an open natural capital accounting standard that forms a foundation for environmental-economic improvements in agriculture and investment in natural capital. She hopes to enable extensive practice of natural capital accounting and development of markets for services and tools for data collection, compilation, analysis, and communication to reduce the cost of natural capital accounting.

The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development supported World Soil Day 2020 with a range of resources including a soil pit and free soil science activities for children. Perth NRM acknowledges DPIRD’s coordinated and collaborative effort to celebrate the great work of West Australian farmers. RegenWA is co-funded by Perth NRM and the Western Australian Government’s State NRM Office.