Life on Earth

Accounting for change

Our projects can help reverse the decline by ensuring that what we, as engineers deliver, improves natural capital assets by leaving the environment in a measurably better state than we found it.

But, we can only know that our work has had a positive impact – for example, by enhancing protected natural habitats or by improving flood protection through natural water catchment management – where we have a good picture of what already exists, and its value.

That’s where natural capital accounting (NCA) comes in. It provides a baseline for the stocks of natural capital and flows of services supplied by them, and measures changes over time from land use changes.

Geographical information systems (GIS) are used to map and monitor a physical location for its economic activities and environmental processes. Tools – including Stanford University’s InVEST or Integrated valuation for ecosystem services and tradeoffs model – are available to assign values to different things, such as carbon sequestration, habitat quality and recreation.

These models provide both biophysical and economic assessments, so you can see how much carbon is being sequestered as well as its net present value, for example. The information enables decision makers to quantify the tradeoffs from competing changes to land and to better identity solutions that will enhance both human development and conservation.

We used InVEST to provide a robust, holistic assessment of the potential impacts of a new road in Norfolk. This work demonstrated the long-term benefits, including enhanced carbon sequestration, and accounted for the wider sustainability benefits of compensatory habitat creation.

Growing area of expertise

NCA is a growing area of environmental management and Mott MacDonald is a market leader, both in the UK and internationally.

Our projects in the UK include: looking at integrating NCA into a sustainable catchment management strategy that includes all six capitals of sustainability – financial, manufactured, intellectual, human, social and relationship, and natural; and the natural capital and ecosystems services benefits and disbenefits of investments by regional groups of water providers in new assets, from reservoirs and desalination to natural flood management and natural water purification.

In the Middle East, we are developing an interactive natural capital and ecosystem services smart map for an entire country that can be used by developers, academics and government agencies to determine the best areas for investment and development. The map includes climate change scenarios. In addition, we are assisting on renewable energy projects to ensure that natural capital is not lost during development.

Assessing natural capital provides a better understanding of the mechanisms that link ecological systems to human wellbeing and will improve our decision making. If we put nature, the environment and equity first, then we’ll all also reap the benefits.