Vinay Bale · Urvara.Life · Bengaluru

Nature on
the Balance
sheet

Companies depend on nature and impact nature, but they rarely account for it. And what does not get accounted for does not get funded. What does not get funded does not get priced. So a company that protects a watershed can look no different from one quietly drawing it down.

Urvara exists to change that. We help companies show where their value depends on nature, finance repair before the damage becomes a cost, and let markets see the difference.

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Previously: engineering at ABB, logistics at Urban Ladder, infrastructure consulting at KPMG, and large-scale operations at Uber.

Nature on balance sheets

We do not fund what we do not account for.

That is the problem in its shortest form. A factory may depend on a watershed, a logistics network on heat and drainage, a food company on soil and pollination, a coastal asset on mangroves or beaches. But the accounts usually notice these systems only when they break.

Once the damage appears, it changes names. It becomes input inflation, capex, insurance cost, business interruption, compliance burden or political risk. By then the natural system has already sent the bill through another door.

So the first job is not to say nature is priceless. That is true, but not useful enough. The first job is to make nature visible in the places where money moves: accounts, balance sheets, credit decisions, procurement, insurance, asset valuation and operating budgets.

Compliance has had decades. It can force disclosure and punish some damage. But 2024 was still the first calendar year above 1.5C, with disclosure regimes, carbon markets and environmental rules already in place.
Offsets are too blunt. Nature is not fungible. A company cannot offset local water scarcity with a forest far away. Offsets can also move benefits and burdens away from the communities living with the actual land, water and biodiversity risk. The result can leave indigenous and marginal communities more disenfranchised: the land carries the burden while the credit is claimed elsewhere. P. Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought and his Down To Earth essay on why the poor remain poor are useful reminders of how development language can hide who pays.
Philanthropy creates islands of excellence. Some projects are beautiful. Many are necessary. But grants and CSR have not created an operating model for ecosystem restoration. They produce bright islands surrounded by a sea of underfunded land.
Private capital is moving the wrong way. The private ratio has worsened from roughly 120:1 to 143:1 to 209:1: far more private money still points toward nature-negative activity than toward nature-based solutions. The market is not neutral. It rewards extraction more reliably than repair.

// FIG. 1 · THE CURVE WE NEED TO BEND

Nature & climate · the hidden urgency

The curve we need to bend is far steeper than we thought.

Nature's carbon sink — forests, wetlands, mangroves, ocean phytoplankton — absorbs roughly half of our gross CO2 emissions. If that absorption weakens, the net emissions floor rises, the timeline compresses and the required reduction path becomes much more aggressive.

Assumed starting point42 GtNet CO2 today if sinks hold steady.

Real starting point by 2035~50 GtAs sinks erode, the floor moves up.

Years shaved off timeline-13 yrsThe same crisis point arrives earlier.

Required reduction rate3x fasterThe slope of the bend gets steeper.

The uncomfortable truth: every year of sink degradation does not just raise emissions. It compresses the time window and steepens the required curve. Restoring nature is not a side project. It is what makes the math possible at all.

Gross emissions data: Global Carbon Project. Sink absorption estimates: IPCC AR6 WG1; Pan et al., Science. Sink erosion trajectory modelled directionally from observed forest degradation trends and SSP4-6.0 baseline assumptions.

FIG. 1 The visible climate curve already assumes that the living sink keeps doing its work. If that sink weakens, the curve we need to bend becomes steeper and earlier.

Putting nature value to work

Account for it. Fund it. Price it.

Urvara's path is simple: name the dependency, fund the repair, price the difference. If a company depends on a watershed, that dependency should be visible. If repair protects future cash flows, the balance sheet should have a way to fund it. If one company manages nature risk better than another, markets should be able to see the difference.

The answer cannot be a slightly better version of offsets, compliance or philanthropy. Those tools may remain useful, but they cannot be the centre. The centre has to move to business itself: ecosystem restoration should be funded because it protects value, reduces risk and keeps the asset, supply chain or region working.

The point is not to make a forest look like a spreadsheet. The point is to stop pretending the spreadsheet is complete without the forest.

The dependency is named

Companies can show which revenues, assets and sites depend on water, soil, cooling, biodiversity and flood protection.

Repair can be financed

Nature work can become capex, opex, risk reduction or transition spend, depending on what the asset needs.

Markets price the difference

Lenders, insurers, buyers and investors can distinguish companies that reduce nature risk from those that accumulate it.

Proof of possibility

Start with artifacts people can argue with.

The mission is to conserve and restore 16 million acres in India by 2050. The number is not a slogan. It comes from a practical belief: if a small share of conservable area outside direct government control can be financed and stewarded, the landscape changes.

The market is financing the wrong side.

Private finance for nature-negative activity has moved from roughly 120:1 to 209:1 against private finance for nature-based solutions.

For every dollar of private finance estimated for nature-based solutions, roughly two hundred dollars now flow through private activity that is nature-negative.

01 Visibility layer Nature Impact Index A first artifact to make corporate impact and dependency on natural capital visible in economic terms. Live site 02 Risk and value layer Nature Value at Risk A way to estimate what happens to company value when the natural systems around it weaken, expressed as % revenue, % EBITDA and % AUM at risk. Request link

Join the build

If this problem keeps bothering you, come build.

I am looking for founders, operators, researchers, analysts, designers, field partners and capital partners who want to turn natural-capital accounting into working tools, contracts and markets.