Zero by Default: Rewriting Capitalism's Ledger for Nature

For most of economic history, nature has only ever appeared on a balance sheet once — the moment a chainsaw hit it. Timber, ore, cropland: counted the instant it was extracted. Everything nature did before that moment — storing carbon, filtering water, sheltering species, building soil — was never priced at all. In economics, what isn't priced defaults to zero. We didn't undervalue nature. We valued it at nothing. That default is the real story behind the numbers: land use, agriculture, and deforestation together drive roughly a third of global emissions, not because nature is inherently destructive, but because a system that only rewards extraction will keep extracting.

​Capitalism 2.0 is the case for widening the aperture — using the same tools that built the extractive economy to build its missing half. Carbon markets were the first attempt to put a real price on something previously counted as zero; this panel argues they won't be the last, with wetlands, species, nutrients, and soil next in line. Rather than examining any single mechanism in depth, this panel steps back to ask what's actually at stake: what changes in how capitalism functions once nature's ecological output, not just its raw materials, sits on the ledger — and what it will take, over the next decade, to make that the default rather than the exception.