Natural capital assessment in landscape-scale land use planning: how it works and key challenges

Policy makers, land managers and investors are increasingly interested in considering nature – and the services it provides – in decision making. It is expected that quantifying and valuing natural assets will help drive decisions that are more environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable, and help address the climate and biodiversity emergencies. Government and private sector actors are increasingly looking to better recognise this ‘natural capital’ in public and corporate policies. This is driving a thriving industry of assessment frameworks, methodologies, and tools to quantify natural capital ‘assets’ ranging from stored carbon to biodiversity. But the sheer number of approaches and the language of natural capital can be confusing. This makes it hard to know which tools may for improve decision-making. This brief introduces natural capital terminology, provides a summary of the ‘natural capital approach’, outlines its relevance to strategic, landscape scale land use planning, and introduces some of the tools being developed to support the approach.