Valuing Marine Biodiversity for use in Decision Making (ValMaB - DM)

Vision: To determine novel and policy relevant pluralistic values for marine biodiversity and apply these values to co-develop green investment options, leading to a transformative shift in our understanding and utilisation of the economics of biodiversity.

There have been significant developments in understanding how economies are embedded in nature and how biodiversity can be integrated into economic models and decision making. This has included growth in environmental valuation, ecosystem service assessments, natural capital approaches, and green investments. Despite these advances biodiversity is only sporadically integrated into decision making and remains external to our economic systems. The result is continuing biodiversity loss with negative implications for our society, economy, and fundamental wellbeing. Key challenges include: i. a nascent understanding of how biodiversity provides benefits resulting in a lack of decision grade data; ii. hesitance of users to apply values due to low confidence, poor understanding, and a negligible definition of the beneficiaries; iii. uncertainty regarding routes of green investment.

To address these interconnected challenges ValMaB-DM brings together expertise in marine ecology, human geography, environmental and ecological economics, governance, and finance. The team includes academics, consultancies, and NGOs coupled with an extensive partner network of government, industry and commerce representatives.

To drive a meaningful shift in the understanding and utilisation of the economics of biodiversity our partners highlighted a need for state-of-the-art theoretical development to be coupled with practicable representations. As such ValMaB-DM takes a twin track approach. One track will develop innovative, internationally applicable approaches whilst a parallel track will ground the research in key coastal habitats identified as priorities for net-biodiversity gain at the Solent and the Moray Firth, showcasing potential ecological, social, economic, and financial benefits. To address a critical evidence gap and inform the net zero agenda we will focus on the regulating services: bioremediation of waste and carbon sequestration.

To tackle the stated challenges ValMaB-DM will first substantiate the interlinkages between marine biodiversity and carbon sequestration and bioremediation through the combination of new and existing data to assess how the condition of biodiversity affects the quantity, quality, and resilience of the services. Collaborating with international expertise we will develop consensus on scaling these findings from local to national and generic.
Building on current understanding robust, generically applicable, monetary valuations of carbon sequestration and bioremediation will be further developed and applied to support natural capital accounting frameworks, and also coupled with novel ecological understanding at the case studies. As singular monetary valuations may not align with community aspirations participatory mapping initiatives will be advanced and deployed to engage real world communities in mapping the social values and trade-offs associated with biodiversity and Natural Capital resources. The ecological, monetary, and social values of biodiversity will be connected to decision-making through the co-design and implementation of green investment to maintain and enhance coastal habitats.

Communication and capacity building are at the heart of ValMaB-DM. Strategic stakeholder engagement will be choreographed through the co-development of research, stakeholder mapping, the Programme Steering Group, and sharing of outcomes (e.g. policy briefs, trade shows, social media). We will also run a training programme for practitioners, collaborators and external stakeholders, enabled by Natural Resources Wales and the Coastal Partnership Network, and develop of an MSc course module and capitalise on links to the SuMMeR Centre for Doctoral Training