Natural Asset Companies

Overview

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) are a proposed class of publicly listed company whose underlying assets are the rights to the ecosystem services produced by a specific tract of land or water — carbon storage, water filtration, pollination, biodiversity, and similar benefits — rather than rights to extract or develop the resource itself.[1] The framework was developed by the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), working with the Inter-American Development Bank and former FASB chairman Robert Herz on an accounting methodology to translate ecosystem services into financial disclosures, and was partnered with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which announced in September 2021 that it planned to list NACs, with each company's IPO tied to a specific tangible asset such as a rainforest, marine ecosystem, or tract of farmland.[1] Global ecosystem services were estimated at roughly $125 trillion a year — the market the NAC framework aimed to formalize into tradable securities.[1] NYSE filed a rule proposal with the SEC in 2023 to formalize NACs as a listed asset class, but by 2024 had abandoned the plan, according to Kiplinger's reporting on the SEC filing record, after opposition from property-rights groups and some conservationists wary of financializing nature.[1]

For a Geoist reading, NACs sit at the contested frontier of the rent gradient: they attempt to price and capture the rent of natural capital much as a land value tax prices and captures the rent of land — but as a private, investable security rather than a public revenue mechanism, raising the same private-versus-public capture question this wiki treats as central to resource rents generally. Whether financializing ecosystem services delivers genuine conservation gains or simply creates a new investable rent stream detached from public benefit is unresolved. The proposal did not survive regulatory review: after the SEC instituted proceedings in December 2023 that raised questions — drawn from commenter concerns — about the licensing arrangements for NACs and the relationship between the NYSE and IEG, and amid organized opposition from property-rights and agricultural groups fearful that NACs could acquire control rights over public land, the NYSE formally withdrew the rule filing on 17 January 2024 (SEC Release No. 34-99355).[3][4]

See Also

• Resource Rents — the broader Georgist category NACs attempt to price and securitize
• Ecological Rent — the wiki's narrative page on treating nature's services as rent
• Sovereign Wealth Fund — an alternative, public model for capturing resource/ecological rent for common benefit
• Financialization of Land — the parallel dynamic in land markets this concept extends to nature
• The Secret Wealth Advantage — the discovery source that flags NACs as an instance of "securitising nature itself"

Sources

1. Ellen B. Kennedy, "Natural Asset Companies (NACs): A New Type of Sustainable Investment," Kiplinger, 16 September 2021 (updated 2024) — used for the NYSE/IEG partnership, the $125T global ecosystem-services figure, the per-asset IPO structure, the IDB/Herz accounting framework, and the 2024 note that NYSE abandoned the NAC listing plan per its SEC filing record. kiplinger.com
2. Akhil Patel, The Secret Wealth Advantage (Harriman House, 2023), Ch. 4, 18 — the discovery source flagging Natural Asset Companies as an example of "securitising nature itself." Summarized on the wiki's book page.
3. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, "Self-Regulatory Organizations; New York Stock Exchange LLC; Notice of Withdrawal of Proposed Rule Change to Amend the NYSE Listed Company Manual to Adopt Listing Standards for Natural Asset Companies," Release No. 34-99355, File No. SR-NYSE-2023-09, 17 January 2024 — primary regulatory record of the withdrawal date and the rule-filing history. sec.gov PDF
4. Cydney Posner, "NYSE's proposed listing standards for Natural Asset Companies bite the dust," Cooley PubCo, 22 January 2024 — legal-practitioner post-mortem; used for the NAC governance/reporting design, the SEC's December 2023 order-instituting-proceedings concerns (licensing arrangements, the NYSE–IEG relationship), and the withdrawal. cooleypubco.com