Gretchen Daily has helped redefine what it means to create wealth. At a time when economic systems still treat nature as an externality, she has built an entirely new framework for prosperity, one that counts forests, rivers, and wetlands as assets rather than costs. Through her groundbreaking work, she has given rise to the concept of a nature-based economy, where the natural world is seen not as a luxury to preserve but as infrastructure essential to human survival.
Daily’s journey began far from the boardrooms and government offices she now influences. Raised between Germany and California, she developed a fascination with the living world that would guide her life’s work. After earning her degrees at Stanford University, she joined its faculty and began to pursue a question few economists or policymakers were asking: What is the true value of nature’s services, and how can we account for them before they disappear?
Bringing Nature Into the Ledger
To answer that question, Daily co-founded the Natural Capital Project, known as NatCap, a collaboration among scientists, economists, and policymakers dedicated to integrating the value of ecosystems into real-world decisions. She helped design tools that measure how natural systems like forests filtering water, wetlands storing carbon, or bees pollinating crops support economies and communities.
One of the project’s most influential innovations is InVEST, an open-source platform used in more than 180 countries. With it, governments and corporations can model the economic value of ecosystems and assess trade-offs in development planning. In Costa Rica, for example, InVEST helped quantify how forests near coffee farms increased pollination and yields. In China, the same framework inspired the creation of a new national metric called “Gross Ecosystem Product,” which tracks the economic contributions of healthy ecosystems alongside traditional GDP.
These insights have influenced policies that stretch from Latin America to Asia. Development banks now use NatCap’s tools to evaluate infrastructure projects based on their impact on natural capital. Cities are protecting watersheds instead of building expensive filtration plants. Private companies are rethinking supply chains to account for the value of pollinators and wetlands. Step by step, Daily’s work is shifting the world toward a more accurate and responsible accounting of wealth.
Bridging Science and Policy
Gretchen Daily’s strength lies not only in her scientific innovation but also in her ability to connect worlds that rarely overlap. She speaks the language of finance as comfortably as that of field ecology, translating data into decisions that resonate with ministers, mayors, and CEOs. Her research in “countryside biogeography,” which studies how species adapt in human-dominated landscapes, helped redefine conservation as something that must occur not only in pristine wilderness but also in working lands where people live and produce.
Her fieldwork in Costa Rica and China led to pioneering programs that pay landowners for ecosystem services, essentially turning conservation into an income stream. The approach has since been adopted in multiple countries, showing that protecting nature can also sustain livelihoods.
The Quiet Force Behind a Global Shift
Gretchen Daily is a scientist, but she is also something rarer: a builder of systems that make science actionable. Her work has influenced institutions as diverse as the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Governments that once viewed conservation as a drain on development are now using her frameworks to guide national planning.
Though she has received some of the world’s most prestigious environmental honors, Gretchen Daily remains focused on practical change. Her latest efforts bring together investors, policymakers, and local communities to expand the adoption of natural capital accounting and to design economic models that reward restoration rather than destruction. Each time a government sets aside funds for ecosystem protection or a company embeds nature into its balance sheet, her quiet revolution grows stronger.
Redefining Prosperity
Gretchen Daily’s work marks a turning point in how humanity understands its relationship with the planet. She has shown that nature is not a backdrop to human progress but the foundation of it. Her influence now reaches every corner of the policy world, shaping how nations and businesses measure success.
In her vision, the future of prosperity is one where the health of an economy can no longer be separated from the health of the earth. And thanks to her persistence, the natural world is finally beginning to appear not just in photographs and parks, but in the ledgers that govern our collective future.
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