Author: shannon@redpaint

  The Capitals Coalition and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative recently published new guidance, aiming to enable businesses and financial institutions to better value biodiversity in their decision-making processes. The guidance is the latest in a growing suite of complementary guides for the Natural Capital Protocol. What is the Natural Capital Protcol? The Natural Capital Protocol (NCP) is a decision-making framework…

  Introduction There is increasing interest in natural capital risks and opportunities for sustainable investment and policy practices. Consequently, natural capital accounting approaches provide important metrics for the environment. Both private and public sectors have been exploring how natural capital accounting may offer new approaches to decision-making with focus on more sustainable outcomes for society and the environment. Those efforts…

  Biodiversity Net Gain is increasingly talked about, and is being introduced into legislation and guidance. Hear Scottish Forum on Natural Capital members SLR Consulting share their views about what this actually means, and how it is being used: What is meant by Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG)? Biodiversity Net Gain or BNG is generally defined as “development that leaves biodiversity in a…

  Convened by NatureScot, and the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital, the Natural Capital Roundtables bring together senior representatives from across the public sector in Scotland, with the aim to explore natural capital approaches, share best practice, and develop joint actions. This year's Roundtable theme was "Investing in nature-based solutions for a green recovery", and was chaired by Francesca Osowska, NatureScot CEO. In her opening…

The policy drivers for agriculture and land management within Scotland are changing, with a much greater focus on actively working with nature and developing a better appreciation of our dependencies on the natural world to promote a more sustainable future. Post-Brexit policy, while uncertain, is anticipated to have a greater focus on public payments for public goods, while improving the…

What is biodiversity? Whilst often perceived as simply representing exotic and endangered species, biodiversity includes all of the life on Earth, in all of its forms – from bluebells to redwoods, molluscs to whales – and all its interactions. It is the interactions between biodiversity and non-living resources that generate most of the benefits that flow from natural capital. In…

Scotland’s Natural Capital Asset Index: Tracking the national Index  Robert Kennedy famously said of GDP “it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”. There has been a general consensus that a more comprehensive way to measure wellbeing needs to be found. A failing of GDP is its inability to measure the often free benefits provided by nature,…

Natural Capital assessments – which help to define the value of natural assets – are especially useful for individual farmers and landowners, a trial project has found. The trial applied the Natural Capital Protocol, co-developed by an international team of expert businesses and NGOs, to land-based businesses on two Moray estates run by Crown Estate Scotland as part of its…

Abstract Rewilding as a conservation strategy is gaining increasing scientific, political and public attention, yet empirical evaluations of its impacts remain scarce, especially with regards to ecosystem services. We provide evidence of the change in three ecosystem services (timber [provisioning], pollination [regulating], and aesthetics [cultural]) from up to 27 years of a moorland rewilding strategy in the Scottish Highlands using…

Last month on behalf of the Scottish Government, we at the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital organised a consultation to allow our members to feed into the Environment Strategy for Scotland. The session, which brought together over 20 representatives from business, science, academia and conservation, was held at Scotland’s Rural College in Edinburgh and was chaired by Ian Jardine, National…