Natural assets provide essential services that underpin our economies, our communities, vital infrastructure services, and life itself. They are indispensable for managing the growing risks of a changing climate.

Despite this importance, most governments and organizations struggle to integrate nature into decision-making. One barrier is the lack of standard approaches for identifying, assessing, valuing, managing and reporting on natural assets. 

But the standards landscape is shifting in promising ways. A web of natural asset standards—international and Canadian, public- and private-sector, operational and reporting-focused—is emerging. While there are significant gaps, particularly the pathway to implementation in Canada, these recent shifts provide opportunities both for entities that want to advance natural assets and nature-based solutions, and for funders that want to accelerate current trends.

Global Developments: Frameworks and Standards 

Standards can loosely be divided into those that help with the internal management of nature, and with reporting on nature.  Some apply to the public sector, some to the private sector, and some to both. 

In terms of internal consideration and management of nature, three recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards offer practical “how-tos” that can be applied by both public and private sector entities:

1. ISO 14054 – Natural Capital Accounting for Organizations supports consistent measurement and valuation of natural capital, including ecosystem services.
2. ISO 17298 – Biodiversity in Strategy and Operations provides guidance for integrating biodiversity considerations into organizational governance and decision-making.
3. ISO 17620 – Biodiversity Net Gain provides a framework for designing and implementing biodiversity net gain outcomes across projects of all types and sizes, ensuring nature is left in a measurably better ecological state after development than before.

These ISO standards can be thought of as internal management standards that help organizations understand and manage natural assets, but don’t directly create external reporting obligations.  

A parallel development is occurring in sustainability reporting for both public and private sector entities.

Public Sector

The International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB)—who set accounting standards for public sector entities—published two new standards that begin to change how nature is conceptualised and reported on.

• IPSAS 51 – Tangible Natural Resources Held for Conservation is an accounting standard that applies primarily to those natural assets owned and controlled by an entity for conservation. IPSAS 51 requires a shift in thinking of nature as just an amenity and instead as a public asset that the community relies on. 

• IPSASB SRS 1 – Climate-related Disclosures is a sustainability reporting standard focuses on climate-related risks and opportunities for public sector entities and how they should be disclosed.  

The two standards are linked in that IPSAS 51 creates the awareness that nature is an asset, and SRS 1 asks the entity to disclose climate-related physical risks, impacts on assets and service delivery, and resilience and adaptation strategies, implicitly including for nature.  To do that properly a reporting entity must know the type of assets it has, including natural assets.

The ISO and IPSASB standards form a potentially powerful combination: ISO provides the internal data and processes while IPSASB provides the external reporting architecture.

Private Sector

Turning briefly to private sector organizations, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, the body that oversees global accounting standards, created the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) in 2021. ISSB has issued:

• IFRS S1 – General Requirements for Sustainability-Related Financial Information
• IFRS S2 – Climate-Related Disclosures

These standards set out expectations for disclosure of material sustainability-related risks and opportunities.  Because they are for private sector organizations, entities applying IPSASB will not apply ISSB – but the emergence of these standards underlines a clear trend in how organizations are recognizing nature.

Natural Asset Standards in Canada: Progress, but Key Gaps

For Canadian public-sector entities, the picture is uneven.

Financial reporting is governed by the Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB), but explicit guidance on natural assets is limited. The Intact Centre’s report, Getting Nature into Financial Reporting, lays out existing possibilities but also highlights the lack of clear mandates, consistent methodologies, or dedicated resourcing.

Operational, nature related standards in Canada are advancing more quickly. Examples include:

• CSA W218 – Specifications for Natural Asset Inventories provides a standardized approach for cataloguing and describing municipal natural assets.
• CSA W234 [forthcoming] – From Strategy to Implementation: A Planning Framework for Watershed-Based Flood and Erosion Management using Nature-Based Solutions offers a framework for creating resilient landscapes that function in harmony with natural hydrological cycles.
• The Standards Council of Canada: Coastal Project Options Appraisal Guide [forthcoming], provides guidance for evaluating coastal interventions including built, hybrid, and nature-based options.

These standards help municipalities and other public-sector entities take steps in natural asset management and nature-based solutions, even as formal financial reporting guidance lags behind.

What do these standards mean for Canada?

Across this evolving landscape, several imperatives and opportunities are becoming clear.

1/ Canadian leaders can (and should) take advantage of these standards to advance formal reporting on natural assets 

For Canadian local governments and natural asset managers, the international standards provide not only guidance, but also authority that staff can use to legitimize the case for natural assets to decision makers.  The standards are an opportunity for the public sector to advance their efforts on understanding and conceptualizing nature as something that entities must actively steward, and a strong indication of an emerging trend.  Canadian leaders can start taking action well in advance of these international standards having force and effect in Canada when translated into a domestic norm by PSAB or Canadian Sustainability Standards Board (CSSB).  

2/ Canada must interweave Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and worldviews 

Finding ways of interweaving Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (TEK), worldviews and perspectives into national or international standards (or even conceptualizing whether that would be desirable for First Nations) is an underdeveloped and underfunded area—yet Indigenous knowledge is essential for any meaningful understanding of natural systems and stewardship.  This must be addressed as a priority. 

3/ Standards are needed for the full natural asset management process

CSA W218 helps organizations catalogue their natural assets, but this only one standard relating to one step of natural asset management.  There are glaring unfunded needs for guidance and standards on natural asset condition and risk assessments, ecosystem service valuation, lifecycle costing for natural assets, replacement costing of a natural asset (where this is even an option), and identifying priority natural assets to value. 

4/ Practical Support for Smaller Communities and Organizations

Smaller municipalities and organizations often lack the time or resources to navigate a complex and fragmented standards environment. Much of what is discussed in this blog may simply be too much for smaller, resource constrained communities unless support is made available.  Ensuring that standards are accessible and scalable across all types and sizes of organizations is an important challenge.

5/ Canada would benefit from greater coherence across standards

The relationships between ISO standards, CSA/SCC operational standards, and ISSB disclosures are only partially understood. Ideally, Canada would move toward a single coherent framework that shows how internal operational standards, international reporting standards, and financial disclosure frameworks complement and inform each other.

6/ Clearer implementation pathways are essential

As noted, the international standards do not yet have domestic effect in Canada. The CSSB will determine whether IPSAS SRS1 is applied in Canada and PSAB will determine whether IPSAS 51 is applied, but the timing and manner by which this may happen are currently unclear.  A coherent explanation and governance roadmap is important. 

Why should we care?

Natural assets are central to economic resilience, community well-being, infrastructure performance, and climate adaptation. The ecosystem service standards landscape, once sparse, is rapidly evolving. While gaps remain, there is significant momentum toward creating a set of integrated tools that will help organizations manage natural assets effectively and report on them transparently. This moment presents an opportunity for leading organizations to accelerate their own efforts; and for funders to shape the speed and effectiveness of how natural assets are understood, valued, and integrated into decision-making across Canada and globally.