Foundation for Natural Capital
The Foundation for Natural Capital will convert verified ecological outcomes into investable propositions, activating blended finance across government, philanthropy, ESG-aligned capital, and biodiversity markets.
Robust governance, permanence and integrity will ensure that these investments deliver sustained ecological and community benefits.
Designed to be both community-based and community-owned, the Foundation will offer a long-term home for the region’s conservation and natural capital endeavours, safeguarding decades of work while amplifying impact. We are exploring governance models – cooperatives, community shareholdings, or place-based capital structures—to balance local engagement with strong oversight, giving landholders, individuals, and communities a meaningful stake.
The Foundation for Natural Capital aims to become a trusted vehicle for collective action, driving landscape-scale conservation outcomes across generations while meeting investor, funder, and regulatory standards.
Find out more about the C411 Country Foundation for Natural Capital project.
What is Natural Capital?
Natural capital refers to the stock of ecosystems – forests, wetlands, waterways, soils, biodiversity – that underpin the goods and services human and economic life depend on: clean water, pollination, carbon storage, climate regulation, flood mitigation.
Unlike financial or built capital, natural capital has historically sat outside formal economic accounting, treated as a free input rather than an asset requiring investment, maintenance, and recognition of depreciation when degraded. That’s beginning to shift.
Governments, finance institutions, and corporates are moving toward environmental-economic accounting frameworks. SEEA – the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting was adopted by the United Nations Statistical Commission in 2012 and is the official international framework for natural capital accounting. From that flow Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), Accounting for Nature, the Australian Government’s Nature Repair Act, and instruments like biodiversity credits that attach measurable value to ecological condition and to the work of protecting and restoring it.
For landscapes like the Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges, this shift matters practically, not just conceptually.
A natural capital approach makes it possible to direct funding toward verified on-ground work, building the case that protecting old-growth forest in Liwik Barring, restoring habitat corridors, or maintaining the private land stewardship underpinning Beyond Yellingbo has quantifiable value, not only intrinsic worth.
C411 Country exists because that value isn’t currently being captured at scale: 128,000 hectares of biodiversity, water, and climate function sit largely unaccounted, undervalued, and underinvested – work that measurement and disclosure frameworks like these are starting to make visible to the finance, government, and philanthropic actors who could fund it.