Bringing in participatory approaches to widen the scope of natural capital valuation
Project Lead
Challenges
The Scottish Government (SG) wants to increase the use of natural capital (NC) to bring more economic and social benefits. This goal is included in policies like the Land Use Strategy (2021) and Scotland's Forestry Strategy (2019). Climate change and biodiversity crises are leading to changes in economic priorities, with NC at the centre of a green recovery. The Dasgupta Report stated there is a lack of understanding of the value of nature, causing overuse of natural resources. The report suggests using NC accounting to create a more accurate measure of economic progress, one that takes into account the benefits of investing in natural assets.
Scotland is also putting a lot of focus on conservation finance, including the goal to invest £1 billion in nature-based solutions. This is part of the plan to reduce carbon emissions, improve resilience to climate change, and bring economic and social benefits to people and businesses. SG's policies aim to build strong communities, fight social exclusion, and promote healthy lifestyles, and NC valuation can help make decisions about resource use and management.
NC accounting provides valuable information for decision making and policy appraisal. It can estimate the contribution of ecosystem services (ES) to income and well-being, provide evidence of the benefits of ES, and guide decisions about payments for ES. Valuation can also help resolve conflicts between different interests and guide decisions to prevent damages that harm society.
Scotland has a variety of NC measurement tools and programs, including Scottish NC Accounts and the Asset Index, which provide a high-level view of the value and state of NC. The NC Pilot Program is a series of projects to test NC accounting methods and approaches to inform SG's policies. The Regional Land Use Partnerships, which involve government, communities, landowners, and other stakeholders, aim to facilitate NC-led collaborations at the regional level. However, NC approaches can face challenges from conflicting values among different groups of stakeholders. Currently, NC is seen as the value of the expected future flows of ES, considering the history of NC use or extraction, which can sometimes lead to conflicts between policies targeting different ES.
Questions
- What are the key gaps in current natural capital valuation?
- Which of the natural assets that are not currently included in natural capital measurement should be prioritised for valuation methodology development? Are there other dimensions of value that would be helpful to incorporate? How could these be captured/measured? What decision/policy contexts might these wider aspects of value helpfully support?
Solutions
This project aims to advance NC research methods by making them more relevant and accessible to different audiences and improving their usefulness in policy analysis and decision-making.
Knowledge appraisal
This project is reviewing existing methods in use and application of NC valuation to explore knowledge gaps and identify opportunities for going beyond the state-of-the-art. Primary data is collected through interviews and stakeholder engagement, and empirical evidence is obtained from the analysis and synthesis of information derived from a literature survey comprising policy documents, peer-reviewed publications, reports of relevant organizations, projects, and programmes, and selected grey literature. We are prioritising recent knowledge gained in Scotland.
Conceptual framework and innovative toolset
We are co-designing a holistic, end-user-relevant framework for capturing systems’ complexities and interconnections. The framework is connecting NC to ecosystems’ condition and extent accounts and improves our understanding of dependencies between the condition and characteristics of natural assets and ES. Our work aligns with the NC protocol approach to help decision-makers in making more informed decisions. It aims to reveal the complex and dynamic relationships among stakeholders, human-environmental relationships, and those between NC and the ES provided.
Effective NC valuation would also require expert facilitation and appropriate information technology to capture and communicate results. Thus, we are developing an innovative valuation toolset of mixed methods. Also, digital methods are being refined and widely used to facilitate participation, necessary for data collection, policy review, and building scenarios encompassing a range of values of NC and ES.
Stakeholder engagement and expert consultation
We are coordinating a participatory platform which is playing a key role in the project activities. The multi-actor platform is being used to:
- Gain a better understanding of experts’ and stakeholders’ attitudes and perceptions of NC valuation,
- Identify and explore knowledge gaps,
- Establish the appropriate dimensions of value.
We are co-producing a tool kit of engagement methods and approaches, including novel visual resources for GIS and spatial representation and NC apps and data portals. This includes developing interactive 3D models and carrying out research on the visualisation of data representing NC, which can be used in engagement and dissemination with policymakers, stakeholders, and the public. Among the tools for integration in the toolset are those enabling understanding of the ecosystem’s location and appearance, and reflecting on its size, extent, condition, and other characteristics. Thus, we are providing more inclusive, comprehensive, and impartial insights into the benefits that humans derive from ecosystems to better capture the socio-economic value of stocks and flows of ES.
Testing the framework and approaches developed in living labs
We are testing and applying a conceptual framework and innovative toolset for valuing NC. Two Scenarios are being developed to quantify and define the relations between ES and NC in two case studies:
- Ecosystem assets of woodlands (based on a whole-systems approach to capturing various interactions and distribution of benefits/ disbenefits)
- The effect of climate change (by considering wildfire risk).
Policy and practice implications
We are translating research outputs and findings into policy and practice guidelines. Our focus is on improving the environmental, socio-economic, and cultural understanding of the values of treescapes to inform decision-making on the expansion of woodlands, or it could be on helping to avoid and manage potential conflicts and build a common culture of risk prevention and preparedness. Scientific research underpinned by two workshops with relevant stakeholders is being used to co-create a set of recommendations on the different policy scenarios and build trust in the scenario model results that will inform the evaluation of policy options.
Project Partners
Progress
In this year we have built the team and developed interaction between its scientific and stakeholder labs, with experts, stakeholders and other projects with the same focus in the current Strategic Research Programme. These connections are informing the selection of a pilot area and facilitating the sharing of knowledge to better understand existing gaps in NC valuation, including those revealed from a survey of relevant literature (completed; with new entries to be added, as the project progresses). As planned, with the focus on NC and ES of woodlands, we addressed Research Questions on the gaps in NC valuation and the dimensions of value, which require further consideration, by reviewing the literature on the methods-in-use and their application, primarily in Scotland/the UK.
The main findings from our research are:
i) The under-representation of subject areas of economics and forestry in the review of 3,415 papers published internationally on the topic.
ii) Increasing evidence, in Scotland, of landscape scale initiatives that address the relationships between people and place to inform value and decision making beyond the economic benefits generated by woodlands.
iii) Studies on cultural ES are emerging in the woodland/forestry domain, but more in other contexts, such as the coastal and marine environments.
iv) Innovative methods are of community voice and participatory mapping based on GIS analysis that integrates base maps, including aerial or satellite images.
v) Opportunities to quantify cultural ES are emerging from analysing preferences at the landscape level through integrated visual approaches (GIS; 3D rendering) and the implementation of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS), e.g., using touch table techniques. This finding validates the incorporation of participatory, as well as digital and visualization tools.
vi) Cultural ES are not sufficiently incorporated into decision making to formulate best strategies for land and natural asset management nor to maximise delivery. An opportunity is in the integration of NC valuation of broader values to inform more specific aspects related to woodlands and their ES, and their effects on land uses and land users.
vii) Natural capital-based instruments and activities have emerged and a willingness by the Scottish/UK Governments to explore alternative conceptualisations of economic success and inclusive wealth. However, high-level policy often fails to produce a trickle-down into secondary policy due, in part, to a lack of regulatory incentives. Consequently, social and institutional innovations on the ground remain uncommon.
viii) Collective actions, which facilitate joining up thinking and actions across sectors and stakeholders, and the development of links between policy levels and activities, offer credible prospects of pathways to operationalizing what is, so far, a largely conceptual approach.
ix) Bringing in participatory approaches into NC valuation raises questions around how this might be instrumentalised (e.g., of incentives). The enablement via policy of collective action around NC approaches (specifically in the form of social and institutional innovations) will form the topic of a scientific paper.
Impact of this Project
The advanced knowledge base, regarding NC valuation and existing gaps in valuing of nature, enables the design of tools for national and local scale assessments and the development of approaches to be co-constructed with stakeholders to avoid and/or reduce conflicts when managing and/or using natural resources. Innovation and stakeholder engagement in valuation of natural assets is of importance for policy makers, land managers, investors, local communities, and the general public. This type of analysis is the first of its kind in Scotland focused on forestry and woodlands. We anticipate that it will underpin design of the framework and content of a toolkit of approaches to NC valuation.
As the Project progresses, an expectation is to increase the potential to improve existing understanding of how climate change effects Scotland's Natural Capital can be embedded in associated NC valuations. Thus, the impact of this project is anticipated also in the provision of advanced understanding of the values of Scottish woodlands and of the climate. Such understanding is vital when developing strategies and policies and of embedding collective actions and facilitating social and institutional innovations to ensure the continuing delivery of essential ES on which we all depend.
Related Projects
Natural Asset Inventory and Natural Capital Accounts: the aim is to develop a spatially-referenced register of Scotland’s natural assets and contribute to a set of natural capital accounts for Scotland that can over time track the progress of Scotland's green growth aspirations.
- Natural Capital
- 2016-2022