Triple Capital Accounting: Measuring What Truly Matters
Imagine a company that reports a profit — but only because its activities depleted a wetland, polluted a river, or pushed soil beyond recovery. Traditional accounting would still call that “success,” because the only thing it measures is money.
In BIO-CAPITAL’s second Deep Dive, Diana Tomakh (GND Partners) introduced a framework that challenges this logic. Triple Capital Accounting asks a simple question with consequences: What if financial results also reflected the value of nature and communities?
From Single Capital to Three
Classic accounting sees only one kind of capital: financial. TCA adds two that have been invisible for decades: Natural capital — forests, soils, rivers, biodiversity, all the systems that make life possible, and Social capital — people’s wellbeing, local livelihoods, equity, safety, and the resilience of communities. Suddenly, a restored grassland, a wetland that prevents flooding, or a farm that stops relying on pesticides are no longer “externalities.” They become part of the value a company creates.
When a Forest Becomes a Line Item
Tomakh used concrete examples to show what this looks like in practice. A forest in the Alps isn’t just scenery — it captures carbon, prevents erosion, protects villages from landslides. In the UK, a wetland doesn’t simply store water — it prevents floods, filters pollutants, creates habitat. TCA measures those benefits and turns them into financial information.
The moment nature is quantified, it can enter the conversations where decisions are made: investments, risk models, project evaluation, and balance sheets. Or as Tomakh put it: “The language of business is finance. If we monetise biodiversity and social wellbeing, we bring them into boardrooms.”
A Bridge Between Ecology and Finance
And that is the point. Triple Capital Accounting is not about turning nature into numbers for fun — it’s about making ecological reality visible to an economic system that currently rewards destruction more easily than restoration.
Within BIO-CAPITAL, the framework connects scientific data with financial tools like payments for ecosystem services, insurance models, nature bonds and biodiversity certificates. It allows investors to see which projects genuinely regenerate ecosystems, and which only claim to.
When nature shows up in financial reporting, two things happen: it becomes comparable — and it becomes protectable.
