What is the NATURE Tool?

The NATURE Tool is a free user-friendly, easy to use Excel tool to assess the impact of land-use and management changes on natural capital performance. This will encourage both better decision-making and clearly demonstrate the results of positive sustainable action during development.

The NATURE Tool allows assessing up to 17 ecosystem services plus physical and mental health benefits through a scoring system indicating both, the direction and magnitude of project impacts. These scores are aggregated based on policy priorities resulting in an overall ‘people score’ for the project. 

The tool is free to use, applicable across the UK and designed for the application by non-specialists without requiring excessive data or time. The tool can be used across different project stages and at different scales. The minimum requirements are a defined site boundary, habitat data and data on the accessibility of greenspaces of the site.

The NATURE Tool can also be tailored to a local or corporate version, allowing the ‘objective setter’ to define policy priorities and natural capital objectives a project should achieve. This means that a local planning authority, for example, can create its own NATURE Tool version where natural capital priorities and objectives are pre-defined. Any applicable development project in that area then has clear and objectively measurable natural capital objectives to work towards.

For more information, please take a look at our NATURE Tool flyer found here. Alternatively, a number of webinars can be watched here.

Who should use the tool?

The NATURE Tool is aimed for all built environment professionals, planners and related stakeholders with a stake in projects that could affect natural capital such as through land-use or management changes. This includes most planning and development projects including housing and infrastructure. But it can also be used to assess the natural capital impact of conservation and afforestation projects, for example. Some examples of potential tool users can be found below.

Background

In the UK and beyond, there is a growing need for efficient ways to deliver built development such as housing and transport infrastructure in line with the goals of sustainable development. Widespread calls by sustainability leaders for a green recovery in response to Covid-19 have heightened this need. Over recent years, the ambition to secure environmental net-gain (ENG) from new developments have grown.ENG is an approach to development that aims to leave the natural environment in a measurably better state than beforehand. This environmental improvement ambition is the basis for HM Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan.

Leaving the environment in ‘a better state’ must mean much more than net gain for biodiversity (species and habitats). Whilst this is important, evidence and advice presented by the Natural Capital Committee (an official advisor to HM Government) highlight that this ambition must involve protection and enhancement of the core contributions of natural features to wellbeing and prosperity.

These contributions – sometimes labelled ecosystem services – include regulation of air quality (such as through removal of particles from vehicle emissions), sequestration of carbon, mental and physical health benefits through access to natural outdoor spaces, and flood risk reduction. With the green recovery and ‘build back better’, now is the time to enable this ambition to be turned into project delivery. International assessments such as the IPBES global assessment report will ensure that ENG is promoted worldwide.

Sustainable land-use change will only be possible if natural capital is appropriately managed within land use planning and the built environment professions. While an increasing number of local planning authorities (LPAs) and developers recognise their obligations in relation to climate and nature, they often lack the time, resources and expertise to measure the impacts of proposals in relation to the impact on natural capital and the functionality of places for people.

Project Introduction

A key industry challenge for the built environment sector to be resolved was how natural capital impacts and net-gains for the environment can be measured and assessed objectively and efficiently. In response, WSP and the Ecosystems Knowledge Network (EKN), in collaboration with Northumbria University, have developed the Nature Assessment Tool for Urban and Rural Environments (short: the NATURE Tool) to enable built environment professionals to define and objectively assess, measure and manage to what extent new plans or developments achieve net-gains for the environment. While a variety of existing tools currently attempt to measure changes in ecosystem services throughout development, no tool currently situates this change within the context of net-gain. The project aim was to co-develop the NATURE Tool which answers the crucial environmental net-gain question as a new industry standard meeting needs in all four parts of the UK.

In June 2021, the first prototype of the tool was shared with industry partners for testing. Version 1.0 has been released on 27^th July 2021 as a BETA version and is free to use. Our project partnership is in the process of testing the NATURE Tool at more than 30 projects across all 4 UK jurisdictions, covering different green infrastructure setting (urban to rural), project sizes and project types. The feedback from these tests will inform the development of the next NATURE Tool versions. Utilising the project partnership was essential for the tool to meet the requirements of the end-users – a tool developed by industry for industry. The NATURE Tool has been developed with partial funding from Innovate UK.