Environmental protection often gets framed as a tradeoff against economic growth, something governments and businesses do despite the cost rather than because of a return on investment. Colcom Foundation’s resource materials push against that framing, pointing to the 2021 Dasgupta Review, an analysis commissioned by the UK Treasury, which concluded that natural capital underpins all economic activity and that continued biodiversity loss threatens long term prosperity rather than protecting the economy that depends on it functioning well.
Natural Capital as an Economic Asset
The review found that humanity currently draws on natural capital 1.6 times faster than the planet can regenerate it, treating forests, waterways, and soil as an asset base being drawn down rather than maintained for future use by coming generations. Colcom Foundation cites this finding to argue that conservation spending functions less like charity and more like upkeep on an asset every economy depends on, from clean water for agriculture to pollination for food production across entire regions of the country. Left unaddressed, the foundation contends, that drawdown eventually shows up as higher costs elsewhere, in water treatment, in disaster recovery, in food prices paid by everyday households nationwide.
Colcom Foundation channels this economic reasoning into grants supporting land conservation, ecosystem restoration, and water quality improvement across Pennsylvania, where the costs of past environmental neglect are already visible in the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to remediate acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines. Colcom Foundation frames its support for the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds and similar grantees as investment aimed at avoiding a repeat of that pattern elsewhere in the state. Preventing future degradation, in this view, costs considerably less than repairing it after the damage has already been done to a watershed. Colcom Foundation applies that same logic to its land conservation grants more broadly, treating upfront funding for habitat protection as a way to avoid the far larger remediation bills that tend to follow decades of unchecked development or resource extraction. Read this article for additional information.
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