Natural Capital Accounting Conference Has Been Postponed

Update on June 9th, 2020: 

We hope you are well and healthy. The state of the world’s economies means there is a greater need than ever to understand how to balance the management of capital assets and especially natural capital and to set the recovery towards a sustainable path. This makes it all the more unfortunate that we were unable to hold our conference, Communicating the Path to Sustainability through Natural Capital Accounting, last March. When we postponed the meeting, we sincerely thought that we would all be able to come together in September. However, it is not realistic for us to be able to meet in person in September, and the organizing committee feels that the spirit of the Conference will be lost with a virtual meeting. 

In consideration of the above, the organizing committee has decided to postpone the Conference to a later date—most likely in 2021. We sincerely apologize for any additional inconvenience this may cause. We will keep you all informed as soon as we settle on a date.

Note from March 5th, 2020:

We have all been looking forward to the “Communicating the Path to Sustainability Through Natural Capital Accounting” conference at Yale. Alessandra and I began working on this over two years ago. We have had over 130 people register and great enthusiasm, which shows how important this event is. It is now clear that COVID-19 and the policy response to COVID-19 have made it infeasible to deliver the conference we have all been hoping for on March 18-20, 2020.  Yale, UN Statistical Division, IMF, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Capitals Coalition, and the World Bank have decided to postpone the conference until September 16-18, 2020. Please save this date. 

This decision was not taken lightly. We weighed the travel restrictions imposed by some of the organizers, the travel restrictions imposed by a number of participants’ organizations or countries, likely increasing restrictions on visitors by Yale, and personal concerns about traveling against the direct costs of postponing the conference. The restrictions appear to indicate a severely reduced number of participants. We simply will not have the same experience we envisaged with exchanges of views and experiences across different disciplines and sectors and different parts of the globe. Furthermore, the probability of additional restrictions emerging is high, while the chance of restrictions subsiding over the next 14 days is low.

We understand people are anxious about their sunk travel costs. Please remember to cancel or reschedule the travel arrangements that you made. Many airlines are being more flexible than expected. Local hotels should allow you to reschedule. If there is something we can do to help please let us know.

We are terribly sorry to have to postpone but sincerely hope to host you all at Yale in September. We have important work to do. 

Best regards,

Eli Fenichel and Alessandra Alfieri