The Earth Has Shareholders. It Is Time We Recognised Them.

In April 2025, the European Space Agency launched an extraordinary instrument into orbit.

[Biomass](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/FutureEO/Biomass) circles the Earth at an altitude of approximately 666 kilometres. Extending from the satellite is a 12-metre mesh antenna designed to transmit a form of radar never previously operated from space. Its long wavelengths can penetrate clouds and forest canopies, revealing the trunks, branches and structure concealed beneath.

From the ground, a tropical forest presents an almost impenetrable surface. From space, Biomass is beginning to reveal the biological capital stored within it.

It is the first satellite to carry a P-band synthetic-aperture radar. Its purpose is to improve estimates of how much woody biomass the world’s forests contain, where it is located and how it changes over time. Because trees store large quantities of carbon in their trunks and branches, these observations should also deepen our understanding of the role forests play in the global carbon cycle.

The view from orbit is only part of the story. Within forests, terrestrial LiDAR directs millions of laser pulses into the surrounding landscape, creating detailed three-dimensional representations of trunks, branches and the spaces between them. Individual trees can be reconstructed with remarkable precision, helping researchers estimate their form, volume and biomass.

Satellites expand the field of view, while LiDAR and field measurements provide detail and validation. Ecological models connect observations made across different places and times, and data-assimilation systems combine them into a more coherent understanding of how carbon, water and energy move through a landscape.

We are not simply producing better pictures of the Earth. We are constructing the infrastructure through which the living planet can be observed, modelled and increasingly accounted for.

Learning to measure Earth’s Natural Capital

For most of economic history, nature’s relative invisibility provided an excuse.

Governments recorded the value of timber, agricultural output and mineral rights. Companies recorded the land they controlled, the materials they purchased and the products they sold. The living capacity from which those values arose usually remained outside the account. Its value was real, but its economic claim was absent.

That omission was partly institutional and partly practical. We could not see precisely how much biological capital existed, where it was located, how rapidly it was changing or how human activity affected the processes sustaining it. Nature could therefore be treated as an important but approximate background condition.

Earth observation is progressively removing that excuse.

Biomass is one component of a growing constellation of satellites observing vegetation, fire, atmospheric composition, soil moisture, water, ice, ocean colour and human activity. These systems do not produce an infallible planetary account. Different instruments measure different properties at different resolutions. Ground observations remain incomplete, while ecological models necessarily contain assumptions and uncertainty.

Better measurement does not mean perfect measurement, as a recent study by Thomas Luke Smallman, David Thomas Milodowski and Mathew Williams at the University of Edinburgh illustrates.

The researchers integrated multiple geospatial observations within a model of the terrestrial carbon cycle. Their analysis covered the vegetated land surface between 2003 and 2024 and incorporated information on leaf area, absorbed solar radiation, gross primary production, woody biomass, soil carbon, meteorology, atmospheric carbon dioxide, fire and forest loss.

Their purpose was to determine what current observations and models could tell us confidently about terrestrial carbon stocks and flows. The results were sobering. At a confidence level above 95 per cent, existing global datasets were inadequate to establish whether most of the vegetated land surface was acting as a net carbon source or sink. Much of the uncertainty was associated with changes in wood and soil carbon.

Biomass should improve our understanding of wood-carbon dynamics, although soil carbon remains a substantial constraint. This is not a failure of Earth observation, but evidence of the scientific seriousness required. Biomass does not provide a complete account of the living Earth. It makes an important part of that account more visible and should allow the uncertainty surrounding it to be progressively reduced.

From measurement to an account

Biomass primarily helps scientists estimate above-ground woody biomass. In accounting terms, this is closer to a stock than an income. It forms part of the Natural Capital accumulated within a forest at a particular time.

But a forest is not simply a store of carbon. It is a living and productive system in which plants use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic matter. After accounting for the energy used by the plants themselves, the remaining production is known as net primary production, or NPP.

NPP is not a complete measure of nature. It does not capture every species relationship, ecological function, cultural meaning or source of resilience. It does, however, represent something fundamental: the annual flow of living material and energy available to support the rest of the ecosystem.

Human food, animal feed, timber, fibres and many other biological materials ultimately draw upon it. If standing biomass forms part of Earth’s biological balance sheet, net primary production resembles part of its biological income statement.

Humanity appropriates a proportion of that income through agriculture, forestry, grazing, harvesting, land conversion and the replacement of natural ecosystems with settlements and infrastructure. Ecologists describe this as the human appropriation of net primary production, or HANPP.

HANPP includes more than the biomass that eventually reaches a household or company. It can also recognise productive capacity lost when land use alters an ecosystem, together with biomass destroyed during harvest but never incorporated into a final product.

The measure therefore reveals something that conventional economic accounts obscure. Human production does not begin solely with labour, machinery, knowledge and Financial Capital. It depends upon a prior biological income that none of those economic actors created.

Together, these measures begin to resemble an account. Biomass helps us measure part of the stock of Natural Capital held within forests. NPP reveals part of the annual biological income generated by that capital. HANPP estimates the proportion of this income appropriated or prevented through human activity. Degradation impairs the underlying asset, while restoration represents reinvestment.

What remains missing is the Shareholder Equity: the underlying claim against which the use, impairment and restoration of that capital should be recognised.

An income with planetary limits

The biological income generated by the Earth is not limitless.

The planetary-boundaries framework identifies the Earth-system processes required to maintain the relatively stable conditions within which human civilisation developed. Crossing a boundary does not mean that the planet suddenly ceases to function. It means that the risk of large-scale and potentially irreversible change becomes materially greater.

In the 2023 update of the framework, researchers used HANPP as a measure of the functional integrity of the biosphere. NPP represents the energy entering the living system. As humanity appropriates more of it, less remains to support the organisms, food webs and ecological functions upon which the biosphere depends.

The researchers provisionally placed the boundary at human appropriation of approximately 10 per cent of pre-industrial Holocene NPP. The current estimate is around 30 per cent.

Both figures carry uncertainty, and a global percentage cannot describe every local ecological consequence. Nevertheless, the underlying conclusion is difficult to avoid. Humanity is capturing, redirecting or preventing a substantial proportion of the biological income that would otherwise remain available to the rest of life.

Planetary-boundary science tells us there must be limits to that appropriation. It cannot decide who possesses the economic claim within those limits, who should contribute when they are exceeded or who benefits when productive capacity is restored. Those are institutional questions.

Who holds the Shareholder Equity?

In 1797, Thomas Paine approached part of this problem through the ownership of land.

In *Agrarian Justice*, Paine accepted that cultivation and private property could produce enormous benefits. He was not arguing that all land should be divided equally or returned to common ownership. His argument was that the improvements created through labour could legitimately belong to those who made them, while the underlying Earth had not been created by the landowner.

Private ownership had consequently deprived others of access to something originally inherited in common. Paine believed an obligation followed from that loss.

He proposed a national fund financed through payments associated with inherited landed property. From it, every person would receive a capital payment upon reaching adulthood and an annual payment in later life. This was not charity for the poor. It was a payment made as a right, compensating every person for the loss of their natural inheritance.

More than two centuries later, during my time at the Gund Institute, I encountered an attempt to express a related idea in modern economic language.

Robert Costanza and colleagues had developed the *Earth Shareholder’s Report*. Modelled on a corporate annual report and presented under the fictitious name *Earth, Inc.*, it examined the condition of natural, human, social and built capital. Its shareholder-equity section argued that every person shares a common inheritance of natural and cultural assets capable of producing actual or potential dividends.

The metaphor changed the perspective. If the Earth were understood as an enterprise, its performance could not be judged by the growth of financial activity alone. We would need to examine the condition of the capital supporting human wellbeing, the liabilities being accumulated and the distribution of benefits arising from assets that no individual or corporation created.

Paine established the claim arising from natural inheritance. Costanza and the Gund team imagined humanity as shareholders in a common portfolio of capital. The scientific capabilities now emerging allow us to take that idea much further.

Why can’t we have an Earth Shareholder?

Not a global owner controlling every forest, field and fishery, nor an institution that displaces the rights of landowners, nations, Indigenous peoples or local communities.

An Earth Shareholder would recognise an underlying claim alongside those particular rights: the equal claim of every person upon the living productivity that nobody created.

Suppose Earth observation, terrestrial measurements and ecological models could estimate the biological productivity of landscapes with transparent levels of uncertainty. Suppose human appropriation could be connected to the companies, products and patterns of consumption driving it, and then compared with the limits required to maintain a functioning biosphere.

Where appropriation placed excessive pressure upon that shared biological income, it would create a financial obligation, just as the use of other people’s capital creates an obligation. The payment would not simply disappear into general taxation or be divided immediately between environmental projects and individual recipients. It would be invested.

Investing the proceeds

A Planetary Restoration Fund could direct the capital towards protecting and rebuilding the productive capacity from which the obligation arose. It could finance forest and landscape restoration, changes in land management, more efficient production and the development of substitutes that reduce pressure on biological systems.

Its purpose would be to convert Financial Capital into restored Natural Capital.

Successful investments would increase biological productivity and ecological resilience. They could also reduce future liabilities, strengthen supply chains and create financial value for companies whose continued production depends upon the condition of those systems.

The returns would not therefore depend solely upon the sale of another environmental credit. Some would be financial, while others would arise through increased productive capacity, reduced exposure to scarcity and regulation, lower restoration liabilities and the future value created by remaining within planetary limits.

Those returns could be shared between two sets of shareholders.

The first would be the company whose activities gave rise to the contribution. Rather than being treated only as an agent paying a penalty, it would become an investor in restoring the Natural Capital upon which its future production depends. If the investment succeeded, the company could participate in the resulting value. The obligation would remain, but the mechanism would give companies a positive economic interest in reducing appropriation and rebuilding productive capacity.

The second shareholder would be every person on Earth. Each would hold the same underlying claim, not because everybody owns every place, but because nobody created the living productivity from which the return arose.

The contribution would capitalise restoration, restoration would rebuild the asset, and the resulting returns would reward both the company financing the transition and the people whose shared inheritance had been used. This is not conventional taxation, philanthropy or environmental offsetting. It is an investment mechanism constructed around the rights and responsibilities of ownership.

The return to citizens

The universal return is central to the proposition.

Environmental policy usually encounters the citizen as a consumer expected to pay more, a taxpayer financing intervention or a beneficiary receiving assistance. Earth Shareholder would place the citizen at the beginning of the account as a holder of the underlying claim.

A proportion of the investment returns could therefore finance a universal citizen income: a regular payment made to every person in recognition of their equal share in the planet’s biological inheritance.

It would not be charity or means-tested welfare, nor would it necessarily replace public services or existing social protection. Like Paine’s original proposal, it would be paid as a right.

The distinction matters. Welfare is often presented as a transfer from those who created wealth to those who did not. An Earth dividend would recognise that part of the wealth being used was inherited collectively. The person receiving the payment would not be the passive beneficiary of somebody else’s generosity, but a shareholder receiving a return from an asset in which they already held a share.

The initial dividend might be modest. Its importance would lie partly in establishing the right and creating a visible connection between the condition of the living Earth and the return received by its human shareholders.

A company would no longer encounter nature solely as a constraint, external cost or source of reputational risk. It could invest in the productive systems supporting its own future and participate in the returns from restoring them. The citizen would no longer be asked merely to accept the costs of environmental transition, but would possess an economic interest in its success.

Restoration would also no longer depend entirely upon governments allocating public expenditure or companies purchasing isolated credits. It would be capitalised through an obligation arising directly from the appropriation of planetary income.

Making it possible

Turning this proposition into a functioning institution would require several capabilities that are usually separated. Earth observation and ecological modelling would be needed to measure the condition and productivity of Natural Capital. Economic accounts would need to connect that capital to companies, products and patterns of consumption, while methods would be required to value appropriation, impairment, restoration and future risk. An investment architecture would then need to convert Financial Capital into restored Natural Capital and distribute the resulting returns transparently.

None of this would be simple, but neither does it require us to begin with a blank sheet of paper. At Route2, we have spent years thinking through the scientific, economic, accounting and financial components of such a system. Our work already connects the performance of companies to the Natural, Human, Social, Intellectual and Manufactured Capital upon which they depend. We have developed methods to measure impacts, value their consequences and assess how the deterioration of those capitals may translate into financial exposure.

Earth Shareholder takes that work into more ambitious territory. It asks whether we can measure the biological income generated by Natural Capital, identify its appropriation, invest the resulting proceeds in restoration and share the returns between the companies financing that transition and the people whose common inheritance has been used.

There is substantial work still to do, particularly around scientific assurance, institutional design and implementation. We do not pretend that Route2 can answer every question alone. But we have thought through how the principal components could connect, and we believe the proposition can be made operational. We would now like to work with the scientists, companies, land managers and institutions capable of helping us make it real.

From visibility to shared inheritance

Biomass began with a scientific question: how much woody biomass is stored in the world’s forests, and how is it changing? Its wider significance lies in what becomes possible as the answer improves.

When the natural assets supporting the economy can no longer be dismissed as invisible, we can observe not only the commodities extracted from a landscape, but the condition and productivity of the living system from which they came. Human appropriation can be compared with the limits required to sustain the biosphere, while restoration can be assessed against the productive capacity it rebuilds.

We could use this new visibility merely to create more precise private claims, allowing those who already control land, technology and Financial Capital to appropriate the newly measurable value. Or we could use it to recognise the claim held by everyone else.

That means you and me. It means our parents and our children, Gemma next door and Miflal in Sri Lanka. It means every person, wherever they were born and whatever they own, because no country, company or individual created the living productivity upon which all economic activity depends.

Earth observation is approaching the point at which we can see the appropriation of planetary wealth. The opportunity is to turn that observation into an account, the account into investment, and the returns from that investment into restored Natural Capital and a universal citizen income.

The instruments are being placed in orbit, forests are being reconstructed from the ground and ecological models are connecting biological stocks and flows. Planetary limits are becoming clearer, while the accounting and valuation methods required to respond to them are taking shape. For the first time, the idea of every person holding a share in the living Earth does not have to remain a philosophical argument.

It can become a practical right: one that restores the productive systems we all depend upon, gives companies a stake in rebuilding them and pays every person a return from their common inheritance.

We can increasingly measure the capital, estimate the income and identify its appropriation. Now we need to recognise the shareholders.

All of us.

This essay began as a line of enquiry developed through the work on Value2Society. ChatGPT was used as a thinking and editorial partner, testing the argument, challenging its edges and helping shape it for publication.