LUC is helping to pilot the ‘eco-metric’; a new tool being developed by Natural England, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Defra.  The aim of the eco-metric is to measure gains and losses in ecosystem services, as a result of land use change.

Ecosystem services“Ecosystem Services are components of nature, directly enjoyed, consumed, or used to yield human well-being” (Boyd and Banzhaf (2007))

We recently provided feedback on our pilot project, which was collated in a webinar hosted by Ecosystems Knowledge Network on 30 April.

Natural England made clear that biodiversity net gain is a pre-requisite to the tool.  However, we note that this requires the project being evaluated to be a fair way along the design process before the tool can be applied.

The tool developers and webinar attendees discussed whether the tool could be used at a strategic, site-selection level, in order to maximise opportunities for incorporating net gain into development. We believe that the ability to consider biodiversity and ecosystem service gains and losses at an early stage could help steer development toward more sustainable locations, and possibly feed into Local Plan evidence base documents, such as Sustainability Appraisal.  So far the pilots have highlighted that the tool is well suited to assessments at the site level and that further work would be required to understand whether it can be used at the strategic scale.

Following this useful latest stage, LUC will continue to engage with Natural England, helping them to refine the tool and to identify where it works best.  We will also seek opportunities for the tool to feed into our work, assisting clients with sustainable development from strategic planning to site design and masterplanning.

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