Natural capital assessments in the UK: facilitating Defra Pioneer Projects with NERC-funded research

Recognizing the benefits that are generated in the UK from the natural environment, the government has pledged to be the the first generation since the industrial revolution to leave our environment in a better state than we found it. To meet this target they will produce a 25 year Plan for the Environment. Defra have established four "Pioneer" projects to aid in the development of the 25 year Plan: a catchment Pioneer in Cumbria; an urban Pioneer in the Greater Manchester area; a landscape Pioneer in North Devon; and a marine Pioneer across two sites, one in East Anglia and another component in Devon. These projects are intended to act as test-beds to develop methods for natural capital assessments that could be scaled up and applied at the national level. However, at this nascent stage of development, there is yet little information in the public domain on the methods being trialed by the Pioneer projects, and there is an opportunity for NERC-funded research to play a pivotal role in the development of these approaches.

This Knowledge Exchange (KE) fellowship will amplify and communicate world-leading NERC-funded research on natural capital to facilitate the four Pioneer Projects. The fellowship will communicate lessons learned from current projects driven by the private-sector and NGOs in the UK, allowing the Pioneers to progress rapidly to scalable and transferrable methods in Natural Capital (NC) assessment by benefitting from as many sources of expertise as possible, and engaging widely with researchers and practitioners across the country.

The applicant (BW) has a background in modelling of ecosystem services and natural capital. BW will work part time (60%) as part of the Long Term Ecology Lab in Oxford University, which is a leader in the field of developing decision support tools for biodiversity and natural capital, through the projects LEFT and NaturEtrade, and is well-placed to support the work of this fellowship. For the remaining 40% of time, the Fellow will continue to be employed as a researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

The work programme of the fellowship has three objectives: (1) To map the existing knowledge and research gaps of three groups: the Pioneer projects, NERC-funded research scientists, and practitioners in the UK who are already developing and testing approaches to natural capital assessment; (2) To establish Pioneer Working Groups, and facilitate knowledge transfer between the three groups to aid the development of the Pioneer projects; (3) engage with a broad range of beneficiaries, sharing the findings of the fellowship.

The key beneficiaries of this fellowship are the Pioneer projects themselves, Defra and its agencies the Forestry Commission, Natural England and the Environment Agency, and the the Natural Capital Committee. The work in this fellowship will be tailored to the needs of the Pioneer projects as they develop. Additional beneficiaries include practitioners such as Local Nature Partnerships, Catchment Partnerships, private businesses such as water companies, chartered institutes and land owners. The NERC-funded research community will also benefit from the dissemination of the fellowship findings.

The results of this fellowship will be disseminated through a range of means, including personal briefings to individuals or projects, publicly released reports, and presentations by the fellow at meetings, workshops and conferences. Public reports will be disseminated widely by making use of existing networks including the Ecosystems Knowledge Network.

The measure of success of this fellowship will be if there is improved transparency in the Pioneer projects and if they engage with researchers and practitioners across the UK. Approaches developed in the Pioneers will act as templates for the national scale, and by funding this fellowship NERC will ensure that the world-class research on natural capital in the UK has greater impact.