Looking Beyond Carbon Toward a Nature Market
Over the past year, climate policy has quietly taken a turn not toward new emissions targets, but toward measurement itself. Governments are finally beginning to build the accounting systems that determine how environmental impact is defined, compared, and eventually governed. Before markets can function, before trade rules can apply, and before enforcement can exist, something more basic has to happen: the world has to agree on how to count.
In January the U.S. signed into law the Providing Reliable, Objective, Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency Act, the PROVE IT Act. The law does not impose a carbon tax, nor does it create a new regulatory program. Instead, it requires the Department of Energy to compile detailed data on the greenhouse gas intensity of industrial products, both domestic and foreign. Steel, cement, aluminum, batteries, turbines, the materials of modern infrastructure, will now acquire measurable climate characteristics.
Photo by Janak Bhatta / CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
At nearly the same moment, China expanded mandatory emissions reporting to airlines and heavy industry, part of a broader shift toward structured disclosure and an enlarging national carbon market. The move is still preliminary. Reporting alone does not yet bind international commerce, and until such standards appear inside global rule setting bodies, notably the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization, the policy remains more signal than settlement. But signals matter. They tell markets which direction legitimacy is likely to travel.
Taken together, these moves suggest something larger than policy coincidence. The world’s largest economies are beginning to align around a shared premise: before regulating climate impacts, you measure them.
Jay Bassett, a board member at +Nature, describes the moment as one where “nature, carbon, and life are being pulled into economic and trade systems but not yet on nature’s terms.”
The PROVE IT Act is framed as neutral transparency. But transparency doesn’t stay neutral for long. Once products carry comparable emissions profiles, trade disputes, procurement standards, and border adjustments will inevitably follow. Climate policy becomes trade policy.
But therein lies the risk.
If carbon becomes the only metric embedded into commerce, then the living world is reduced to emissions. Forests become offsets. Wetlands become storage. Ecosystems are just compliance instruments. Bassett warns this risks what he calls “a dangerous reduction, carbon as the only proxy for life.”
It’s not that carbon measurement is wrong–it’s just incomplete. Atmospheric chemistry is only one function of ecosystems. A mangrove reduces storm surge. A watershed purifies drinking water. A healthy biome stabilizes livelihoods. None of these fit neatly inside a single emissions coefficient.
But once accounting systems harden, what they count defines what matters. In Jay’s view, once governments require measurement, “the next step is asking what keeps us alive.”
China’s reporting expansion reinforces the urgency without resolving the question. When international aviation and shipping bodies adopt comparable frameworks, the signal becomes a system. Until then, the world sits in a transitional phase, a scoreboard being assembled before the rules are finalized.
Jay frames the choice starkly: either “we lock in a world where carbon is priced and life is ignored,” or this moment becomes a chance “to re embed living nature and human dignity into the economic operating system.”
For +Nature, the objective is to widen the lens before it narrows, to argue that accounting systems should recognize living systems as infrastructure, not externalities.
The point is practical as much as philosophical. Every economy depends on a set of starting conditions it did not create: breathable air, drinkable water, and landscapes that absorb disturbance. We usually notice this only when those systems fail, when smoke fills a city, a watershed is contaminated, or storms overwhelm places that once held firm.
As governments begin building environmental accounting systems, those realities enter the conversation in a new way. The question is no longer only how much carbon a product emits, but whether our measurement systems recognize the wider set of functions that make daily life possible. That distinction matters, because what we choose to measure is what we learn to manage, and eventually what markets learn to value.
That is the space +Nature occupies, ensuring that as climate policy becomes economics, economics does not forget what sustains it. Clean air, clean water, and durable communities are not co-benefits of decarbonization. They are the baseline conditions of human prosperity, without which markets have nothing to optimize.