This summary describes a payment scheme designed to provide grants to landowners for planting new woodland in and around the North East Community Forest area. The scheme, commissioned by the North East Community Forest, establishes the best locations to target, and sets payment rates that reflect the public benefits delivered.
NCS led a team on the Bedfordshire LNRS Blue Lens project. This project focussed on identifying and mapping a series of opportunities that would enhance the freshwater environment both in terms of its contribution to nature recovery (through building nature networks), and through providing wider environmental benefits that meet the various water challenges in the Upper and Bedford Ouse Catchments (nutrient pollution from agriculture, flooding and low flows, and wetland loss). The aim was to ensure that considerations around the water environment could be brought into the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) process in Bedfordshire. A variety of GIS processes were employed alongside the habitat opportunity mapping, e.g. hydromorphological pressure and condition mapping, river obstacles analysis, hydrological modelling, and leaky dams analysis. These were all brought together to produce maps of the opportunities for habitat creation, restoration and nature-based solutions that would meet the water challenges in the catchments. Stakeholder input was integrated into the process through workshops and meetings.
NCS were commissioned by the North Northamptonshire Responsible Authority to produce the mapping layers for the Local Habitat Map. This built on many years of work completed in the area around opportunity mapping for biodiversity and wider environmental benefits, and other projects. For the LNRS we produced GIS layers of numerous measures to create the Areas that Could Become Important for Biodiversity map. The North Northamptonshire LNRS was only the second across England to be fully completed and published, and was commended by Natural England and others for the quality of its mapping.
NCS were appointed by Cambridgeshire County Council to provide GIS support for the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough LNRS. NCS had already completed natural capital and opportunity mapping across Cambridgeshire, and the LNRS project involved collating numerous datasets and updating the habitat basemap. As in the Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes LNRS (outlined above) NCS produced the mapping required for the Local Habitat Map and the maps supporting the Statement of Biodiversity priorities. The latter involved creating maps to inform the development of the priorities and measures for the region, in collaboration with the LNRS production team, and a negotiation of how best to identify, map and present the enhance and create opportunities. It also included revising maps, creating new output for continued engagement and consultation, and producing methodology reports. The draft LNRS has just been released for consultation.
NCS were commissioned to manage the pre-and post-public consultation LNRS development process, provide the mapped evidence base and co-write the strategy text for the Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes LNRS. NCS produced maps of the location, extent and condition of habitats across the region, before using opportunity mapping to highlight the best locations to create or restore habitats related to the priorities and measures for the region. NCS also created maps showing the best opportunities to enhance the provision of a range of ecosystem services, along with a range of other opportunities. Maps were analysed and summarised for different National Character Area zones across the study area and weighted by stakeholder priorities.
NCS also created a web-based interactive portal to display all of the maps. This will be publicly accessible when the LNRS is published and the draft output was available for users during the recent public consultation. NCS also created a StoryMap of the draft LNRS for consultation. NCS prepared and delivered all LNRS outputs ready for public consultation, in line with the Statutory Guidance (Sections 104-6 of the Environment Act 2021) and Buckinghamshire Council’s Accessibility Standards, and assisted with delivery and communications. This included report writing, editing, oversight and task allocation of all LNRS outputs, and writing the Priorities and Measures, Stakeholder Engagement and LRNS methodology statement outputs.
This project considers what it would mean to double nature across Northamptonshire and Peterborough and how it could be achieved, and presents this in the form of a Natural Capital Investment Plan. The project began by modelling, mapping and valuing the natural capital assets across the area and identifying key policy drivers influencing decision making. It then determined what it would mean to double nature and calculated the costs and benefits of doing so. It mapped a potential nature recovery network, as well as opportunities to enhance natural capital to meet a range of further objectives. It identified priority areas for targeting these interventions and collated a list of potential natural capital projects being considered across the area. A number of emerging funding mechanisms that could be used to deliver such projects were then identified and described. Six case studies are presented to illustrate the costs and benefits of different types of natural capital projects, and conclusions and recommendations for taking this plan forward are presented.
The project involved a fine-scale and detailed mapping of the natural capital assets, biodiversity and ecosystem services baselines for the open spaces and green infrastructure owned by the City of London Corporation (CoLC).
NCS led a project that explored the development of a tool or set of tools that can quantify and value the health and well-being benefits related to the use of the NHS outdoor estate in Scotland. This included surveys and interviews of key personnel in NHS Scotland to inform an understanding of the taxonomy of uses associated with the NHS outdoor estate; the development of a conceptual logic chain of the relationships between natural capital, activities in greenspace, health and well-being benefits and their value; a targeted rapid literature review of the scientific and grey literature to reveal metrics of health and well-being benefits and the value from activities akin to those that occur on the NHS outdoor estate; and a consultation with academic health economists to discuss the appropriateness and robustness of the valuation methods identified in the review, and how NHS Scotland can best approach the valuation of these benefits across the estate and the data required.
The findings emphasised that there is no quick route to valuing the health and well-being benefits of the NHS outdoor estate in a robust way. There may be some quick wins using benefits transfer from other studies for specific organised health activities where there are known numbers of participants, or from very generic recreational activities in specific habitats (such as walking in woodland). Primary studies using surveys will be necessary to quantify and value health and well-being benefits across a range of NHS outdoor estate activities. The most efficient use of resources would be to prioritise certain activities or user groups and run different projects on pilot NHS Health Board sites. The learning can then be applied to other sites and be used in a future valuation toolkit in the medium to long term.
A project commissioned by RSPB Northern Ireland that explored the added value that enhancing farmland nature can deliver, and assessed its viability in the context of changes to agricultural policy post-Brexit, and the need to address the climate and nature emergencies. The report was delivered as an interactive html file.
A project examining natural capital asset condition in rivers and how this impacts on ecosystem service provision. In particular, this involved a Quick Scoping Review (QSR) of the links between natural capital asset condition and the provision of ecosystem services, and determined if it was possible to map condition from existing data, reviewed approaches to doing this, and identified evidence and data gaps.
