Natural Capital Project

This project was part of the Defra-wide Natural Capital & Ecosystem Assessment (NCEA) Programme, which is assessing the need for, and where necessary, developing new or improved natural capital indicators, metrics, maps and tools to support the Environment Agency’s (EA) understanding of the services, benefits, and values that are derived from natural capital assets. The focus of the project was to build the evidence base in river systems, so the RRC was brought on board to provide expertise in this area.

One main objective of the project was to identify how asset (river) condition can be inferred from existing data. The condition of a river in terms of natural capital was based on assessing the processes and functions that deliver ecosystem services.

The review of data, indicators and tools identified a large number of datasets that could be used to measure or model condition. For some ecosystem services there were lots of data and tools available (e.g., water flow; habitat population and maintenance), but some gaps were apparent (e.g., education, training and investigation; spiritual and cultural experience). This indicates where data and evidence need to be strengthened to better understand river’s contribution to natural capital. The next steps were to create indicators from the datasets that can be mapped at a national scale.

RRC have been working on later phases of this project to assist in the mapping of ecosystem services relating to river condition, with the view to creating a future tool.