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SDG: 11 Sustainable cities and communities

Sustainable cities and communities

The Challenges

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have huge potential to support climate mitigation, adaptation, nature recovery, food security, rural economy and human wellbeing, but implementation is slow and patchy.

Some interventions are poor quality, leading to adverse impacts and undermining legitimacy and social support. These are due to a range of barriers, including a lack of high-level policy support and funding, patchy evidence on the benefits of NbS, cultural barriers, governance challenges, and knowledge gaps on how to maximise benefits while reducing trade-offs.

There is a need to illuminate these barriers and identify enabling factors that support the deployment of high quality NbS projects that put the right NbS in the right places, working with local communities to balance competing goals and harness synergies. To address this challenge, the Sprint team identified three key objectives, which were refined through co-creation with key stakeholders. The Sprint aimed to:  

  • Develop tools and guidance to support practitioners in engaging with local communities and other stakeholders, identifying funding, strategically planning the delivery of a network of high quality NbS at landscape scale, and monitoring the outcomes.
  • Model NbS potential at national scale, and provide key recommendations for policymakers on how to support effective NbS delivery.
  • Develop and promote a set of compelling case study stories to inform and inspire both practitioners and policymakers, showing how high quality NbS can be part of a transition to a more sustainable society.

The Solutions

The Sprint researchers created tools to support the planning, implementation and funding of NbS activities. To plug the gap in understanding of NbS governance, a Recipe for Engagement was developed as a best practice guide for practitioners to engage meaningfully with stakeholders and the public. This was complemented with a funding finder tool, and an open source software package to help people create opportunity maps for planning nature recovery and NbS at landscape scale for any area in England. These, along with case studies and guidance documents were incorporated into the Knowledge Hub, an interactive library of resources from Agile and other freely available sources to act as a one-stop-shop to inform the planning and implementation of NbS. Additionally, the Sprint capitalised on policy opportunities that arose during the Sprint with submissions of written evidence, policy and research briefs.

The Pathway

This Sprint brought together a large team of researchers from ecology, geology, natural resource governance, environmental science, environmental social science, and soil science. Regular ongoing co-creation with stakeholders was enhanced by sharing indicative findings from the various workstreams. Input and guidance from stakeholders in Defra, BBOWT, Defra, Environment Agency, Highlands Rewilding, National Trust, Natural England, NFU, RBG Kew, UK CEH, WWF, University of Aberdeen and others helped to shape the direction of research and the primary outputs based on identified needs. This enabled the development of a range of easy-to-use tools that facilitate planning, funding, implementation, governance and monitoring of NbS and nature recovery at local, regional and national levels of scale. Further research and outputs will be taken forward by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR). 

What happened next?

Co-creation with a range of stakeholders was key to producing tools and outputs for use at different levels. The Sprint used DEFRA’s input on barriers and enablers to NbS to guide the research trajectory and inform the generation of tools such as the Opportunity Maps that augment DEFRA’s land use strategy. It also capitalised on policy opportunities as they emerged, generating written evidence and policy briefs relating to the National Adaptation Plan, soil health, and blue carbon code for UK seagrass, all informed by and relevant to DEFRA.

The Challenges

If the UK is to meet its own and international biodiversity targets, it needs to be able to properly measure the impact of economic development projects on biodiversity. It also needs to be able to deliver social welfare benefits alongside nature restoration, as well as balance trade-offs between commitments to economic development and biodiversity improvements.

At the time the Sprint was planned, HM Treasury had commissioned the Dasgupta Review of the economic case for biodiversity, set bold targets for nature recovery, and were updating their ‘Green Book’ guidance on government investments. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the UK government were gearing up for the launch of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) policy under the Environment Act. However, BNG as formulated at the time had potential to further disadvantage already-disadvantaged groups, and scalable approaches to measuring biodiversity for governmental and industry end-users were unavailable, despite being fundamental to making progress.

This Sprint aimed to identify just and actionable pathways to BNG, supporting an integrated approach to renewing and restoring nature, working directly with HM Treasury and Defra. The Sprint tackled three interlinked issues:

  • How to robustly measure the biodiversity impacts, positive and negative, of business and governmental investments
  • How to reconcile commitments to invest in biodiversity improvement with the economic and social welfare of people most affected by these investments
  • How to deliver sustained, socially just welfare improvements – together with biodiversity gains at the landscape level – using spatial modelling and an exploration of scenarios for development.

The Solutions

  • The Sprint team found evidence that scoring by the Biodiversity Metric may not reflect invertebrate diversity and abundance. This presents a concern in how habitats are valued under BNG.
  • Most early BNG in England has been on-site, but findings from the Sprint team indicated that people have a preference towards off-site offsetting. The Sprint team propose that access should at the very least not be diminished, and BNG should be integrated with access to nature targets where possible.
  • Spatial modelling results showed current BNG offsetting practices are insufficient, and demonstrated that by incorporating ecological and economic information into the targeting of offsets, the offsets can provide a significant contribution to addressing the challenge of biodiversity loss and deliver substantial ecosystem service co-benefits to disadvantaged communities.

The Pathway

Tackling this challenge required layered multi-disciplinary outputs. The Sprint team combined social sciences expertise for local stakeholder engagement, modelled work to assess national, regional and local scales, and completed biodiversity fieldwork. Continuous stakeholder engagement through workshops and webinars lent a transdisciplinary dimension to shaping these layered outputs. The Sprint team also hosted a two day nature Recovery Symposium in March 2023, bringing together researchers working on the science that could underpin planning for nature recovery with decision-makers and practitioners working within government, industry and civil society, to discuss how science could best be deployed to support decisions for nature recovery (further details in this report).

What happened next?

This Sprint developed a best practice ‘Biodiversity Net Gain checklist’ for Local Planning Authorities who evaluate the Biodiversity Gain Plans submitted with planning applications. This was a bottom-up approach to supporting effective policy implementation, as having a strong BNG element within the Local Plan creates a solid foundation for planning and executing effective BNG policy.

DEFRA stated that findings from the research would directly inform policy, and HMT confirmed the research was fundamental to what it was trying to achieve. BBOWT has acted on some of the fieldwork advice relating to BBOWT and farmer-owned land. A webinar presenting the Checklist to the Planning Advisory Service demonstrated how it could reduce to the types of errors from early adopter councils using the Biodiversity Metric. Following engagement with Oxford University’s Estates and Facilities Biodiversity Sub-group, the team submitted a successful SRF bid to work on the Begbroke science district as a living lab, which has incorporated the learning from the checklist and committed to a target of 20% BNG for the site.