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The tourism sector is regarded as a modern-day engine of growth and has significant potential to serve as a vehicle for socio-economic upliftment. Evidence also illustrates the potential that pro-poor tourism has for incentivising natural capital protection and ecosystem restoration. This paper explores the impact of the decline in global tourism, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, on incentivising environmental management. This is analysed in conjunction with emerging literature on the impact of environmental degradation on exacerbating risks of zoonotic diseases such as Covid-19. A causal loop diagram was developed to map the system and reflect its structure and functioning and capture interactions. The behaviour of the system was used to explore the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on SMME development. This informed the re-examination of the key constraints identified as currently limiting development and growth of pro-poor tourism SMMEs. The results re-emphasise the tourism sector’s vested interest in investing in the protection of natural capital and restoration of degraded ecosystems. It highlights the need for the sector to act collectively to support recovery from Covid-19, and build resilience by developing a strategic vision for tourism that is more sustainable and equitable, and balances the needs of people and the environment.

There is growing concern that ongoing degradation of natural capital, due to various global and local drivers of change, will compromise the delivery of the ecosystem services on which the tourism industry relies. This chapter aims to explore the relationships between natural capital and tourism. The chapter first provides an introduction to the inter-dependencies between business and natural capital and presents an overview of the tourism sector in South Africa. The focus then shifts to conceptualizing the links between tourism and natural capital, focusing on inland freshwater systems. A conceptual framework of the interactions between natural capital and the tourism sector is presented and key links between hydrologic ecosystem services and the tourism sector are described. In the final section, the risks of increasingly stressed water resources on tourism and the South African economy are explored.

Both internal and external stakeholders of organisations are increasingly aware of the importance of natural capital in creating sustainable value. Corporate reporting on natural capital has been growing considerably over the past couple of decades, particularly for issues such as climate change, water and waste. Yet, quantified data disclosed is currently essentially limited to annual flows, such as resource use or emissions, failing to account for net impact on natural capital. This paper proposes new conventions to double-entry bookkeeping to facilitate net biodiversity impact accounting and disclosure. Case study applications involve assessing the net ecosystem impacts of both the Nimes-Manduel-Redessan train station and Cossure offset projects, in the South of France, to record the periodic and accumulated changes in ecosystem extent and condition, without compromising the incommensurability of biodiversity components. Assuming the two projects belong to the same business, the scaling up of project-level data and their aggregation at the company level are demonstrated through the development of Statements of Biodiversity Performance and Position.

Firms have traditionally viewed biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES) as external constraints on their activities because of regulations and laws imposed on them. Companies have started accounting for ES to improve management practices and even restore natural capital. Accounting for ES may be undertaken for different purposes, depending on whose needs and aspirations it aims to satisfy. Accounting for ES in a standardised, comparable and transparent manner has become a critical challenge for mainstreaming ES in business decision-making and applications. A lack of standardisation means that ES cannot be consistently accounted for from the perspective of a whole business, a business unit, its supply chains or its products and projects. This prevents ES accounting from being 'mainstreamed'. Ecosystem services-based approaches are a way of understanding the complex relationships between nature and humans in order to support decision-making, with the aim of reversing the declining status of ecosystems and ensuring the sustainable use/ management/conservation of resources.