Making B£ST better: taking the blue-green infrastructure Benefits EStimation Tool online

It is essential that blue and green infrastructure (BGI) is integrated into our towns and cities to enable communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to provide resilience to extreme weather. BGI provides an array of multiple benefits that include: improved health and well-being, reduced flood risk; improved air and water quality; natural cooling; enhanced biodiversity and carbon sequestration.

As with any infrastructure project, decision makers need to understand the costs and benefits involved to decide when to invest the time and money required to implement BGI. Many benefits of BGI can be difficult to quantify in monetary terms (e.g. amenity value, biodiversity) and are unfamiliar items to add to balance sheets designed for more traditional infrastructure projects.

The Benefits Estimation Tool (B£ST) is used by water and sewerage companies, local authorities, environmental regulators, flood risk managers, developers, communities, environmental bodies, urban designers, engineers and land use managers to robustly assess and monetise many of the financial, social and environmental benefits of BGI.

Drawing on robust evidence, the results of B£ST's analyses enable users to understand, quantify and monetise the wider value of BGI. This can support investment decisions, help identify stakeholders to enhance discussions and source potential collaborative funding routes for new development and urban regeneration projects.

The current version of B£ST is in spreadsheet format and is free to download and use. The project proposed is to translate B£ST and a limited number of its key benefits to an online application and a spatial format. The long-term aim is to include more benefits for evaluation, enhance the tool's usability and functionality, and to provide it in the same or similar format as other planning and decision making tools already in use by the target audience.

B£ST in its existing format has been in use for some four years, with over 3,000 downloads. Moving to an online application will take the technical learning, knowledge and user feedback from development of B£ST and apply it to a new, easily accessible and user-friendly format.

The basic version of B£ST will remain free to use. Licensed versions of the application will be subsequently developed which will be available for purchase by different types of advanced user. This will fund access to data sets and regular updates to online B£ST which will retain its robustness and reliability.

The vision is a user-friendly, online application which supports the implementation of BGI by demonstrating the monetised value that its multiple benefits bring.