Gretchen Daily is a professor at Stanford University. She works on key frontiers in understanding human dependence on nature – for material basics of nutrition, health, climate security, and economic security to ethereal senses of belonging, beauty, and spirit.  Today, an awakening is underway, to the values of nature as an engine of well-being and prosperity – and to the risks and devastating costs of its loss. 

Making this understanding accessible and actionable is crucial, to inform the profound societal transformations necessary to secure the biosphere and the human future. 

Gretchen is co-founder and Faculty Director of the Natural Capital Project, a 19-year-old global partnership whose mission is to help secure the well-being of people and nature.

She has received numerous international honors. In our context, the Premi Margalef in Ecology.

Together with many colleagues, Gretchen has published several hundred scientific and popular articles, and a dozen books, including Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems (1997), The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable (2002), Natural Capital: Theory and Practice of Mapping Ecosystem Services (2011), The Power of Trees (2012), One Tree (2018), Green Growth that Works: Natural Capital Policy and Finance Mechanisms Around the World (2019).