Valuing benefits from natural flood management
Improvement of the robustness of values used to estimate benefits from “natural flood management” interventions.
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 Environment Agency have developed an inventory of benefit values (‘the inventory’) that can be used to monetise some environmental benefits or ecosystem services in project/investment appraisals in order to help staff and our partners take account of the wider positive and negative impacts of our decisions.
The inventory contains values and metadata used across the Environment Agency, Natural England and Defra. It also contains values sourced from a literature review of economic benefit values on environmental quality changes, with particular focus on benefits relating to water quality, water quantity, flood prevention and natural flood management.
To further develop the inventory from test phase to application phase a robust review and assessment is needed of the most appropriate and relevant values for natural flood management type projects.
This is an opportunity to learn how a public sector organisation applies natural capital and ecosystem services concepts in practice, as we will take the benefit values developed and run them through case studies so the outputs of this work would be applied directly in current natural capital trials, which would take this work from research to application very quickly.