Introducing The Environmental Benefits from Nature Tool

I was pleased to be part of the development team led by Alison Smith of Oxford University thatdeveloped and tested Natural Englands Environmental Benefits from Nature tool.

The Environmental Benefits from Nature tool is designed to work alongside Biodiversity metric 3.0 and provide developers, planners and other interested parties with a means of enabling wider benefits for people and nature from biodiversity net gain. The tool uses a habitat-based approach to provide a common and consistent means of considering the direct impact of land use change across 18 ecosystem service services.

It has been developed by Natural England and the University of Oxford in partnership with Defra, the Forestry Commission and the Environment Agency to support Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan commitment to expand net gain approaches to include wider Natural Capital benefits such as flood protection, recreation and improved water and air quality.

Downloads available

EBN Tool Beta V1.0, XLSB, 2.8 MB 2021/07/15

EBN Principles, PDF, 1.4 MB 2021/07/07

EBN User Guide, PDF, 1.2 MB 2021/07/07

EBN Data Catalogue, PDF, 3.3 MB 2021/07/07