Non-monetary quantification of benefits for decision making and reporting.
Development of methods for non-monetary quantification of benefits to support better planning and decision making in catchments.
Please note: Applications for EA placements will be closed by CoP Tuesday 22nd August, please apply to Rachel.lenane@environment-agency.gov.uk before then.
The measurement tools that natural capital accounting can provide can help us assess the value of nature and ensure that the benefits and services it provides are not taken for granted. However not all benefits are readily quantified or monetised. For example, this can often be the case with some human health and wellbeing benefit.
We wish to develop methods for non-monetary quantification and reporting of benefits to support better planning and decision making in catchments, e.g. to help decision-makers get a sense of scale of benefits/impacts of investments, and possibly use to scale/weight a cost benefit assessment and to be able to report (in an integrated way) a mix of indicators, quantified benefits and monetised benefits.
The kind of metrics that could be considered include: how many people/communities are impacted? Is the scale of impact local, regional, national, international? Will it benefit/dis-benefit vulnerable groups? How many different business sectors are affected? Do the impacts have strategic importance, i.e. facilitate other work or innovate? etc.
This is an opportunity to learn how a public sector organisation applies natural capital and ecosystem services concepts in practice, as we will test the methods that are developed in catchments where we have current natural capital trials, to take this work from research to application relatively quickly.