London is the world’s first national park city, with about 50% green coverage of its surface area. This is the legacy of the public and Royal parks, and Victorian tree planting is something Londoners enjoy on a daily basis. Behind the scenes, major organisations and stakeholders are working to raise the profile of environmental sustainability. Despite London’s heritage, more needs to be done to understand the value of the natural environment and the benefits it brings to people. A concept known as Natural Capital.
Natural Capital
In recent years, society has come to ask more of organisations than that they make a profit.
Explaining their impact onthe environment has become a key demand. The concept of natural capital is a way of understanding the value of the natural environment for the services and benefits that organisations or infrastructure provides to people. It has value like any other asset and if kept in good condition it can continue to provide those benefits – flood protection, urban cooling, carbon capture, food, raw materials. Something that traditional accounting has missed. “I think the failure has been in the fact that we haven’t understood what its value is and haven’t recognised that it has a value. So it’s not actually being captured in any of the ways that we measure progress or success,” says Jennifer Merriman, natural capital and biodiversity working group lead at WSP. “A hidden externality is what the economists will probably call it. But yeah, fundamentally, I think it is to do with what is not visible and not recognised in the traditional ways in which we measure progress.”
WSP is working with Transport for London, to increase biodiversity in one of the world’s greenest capital cities. And a lot comes down to this core concept of Natural Capital. “We’re incredibly lucky in London. We are the world’s first national park city, and we are anywhere between 48 and 51% green,” says Katherine Drayson, who is part of the transport strategy and planning team at TfL.
“We actually have roughly the same amount of tree canopy cover on TFLs, land as London does as a whole. So that’s around 22% canopy cover.”
Biodiversity has become an increasing concern for TfL. And most people probably don’t realise the extent to which this is part of their remit. It isn’t just TfL’s job to make London Underground run on time. When TfL was established under the GLA (Greater London Assembly) Act of 1999 it set out the purpose of social development, improvement of the environment, and economic development and wealth creation. “Sustainable development is core to Transport for London’s purpose. Recognition is growing in society generally about the importance of nature, and I think the pandemic in particular has brought that into sharp focus in people’s minds,” says Sam Longman, head of corporate environment for TfL.
Climate emergency
At the same time Sam says that urgency is growing around tackling the ecological emergency that the world is in. “So what we’re trying to do at TfL is develop the tools we will need in order to maintain focus on the strategic objective of protecting and improving the environment in the way that we build and maintain and operate London’s transport system.”
Part of fulfilling that mission is to develop a Natural Capital account and this has to be done within an achievable framework from a financial and practical perspective. “There’s a limit to what we can and can’t do in terms of the natural environment. We can’t suddenly turn entire streets over to park land, much though sometimes I’ve wished that we could,” says Katherine.
There’s a need to identify where TfL can best place their time, money and how to develop and maintain London’s transport networks to create the best outcomes. “That’s where natural capital, really comes into it’s own. It provides that baseline of where is our green infrastructure, currently. It allows us to identify what condition it is in. Could we enhance it? What services is it providing? What services do we need in particular areas? And using that information, you can start to better target where you put your limited resources.”
This is not only being done for natural capital, but also for biodiversity. Back in 2017, they developed their first biodiversity baseline map, which set out where all of the habitats were on the operational network. This was expanded to cover the entire estate in 2019 to identify opportunities for enhancement. “We’ve built that into our project management processes so that biodiversity net gain can be measured as part of our projects from beginning to end,” says Katherine.
More green infrastructure
Green infrastructure is pretty much anything that’s vegetated. Not just parks and green spaces, it’s also features like green roofs and street trees. But the key to green infrastructure is that it provides a huge variety of benefits to people and to wildlife. “So that’s providing shade, providing local cooling, helping to reduce surface water flood risk,” says Katherine.
One of the other benefits that green infrastructure provides is an attractive environment, which encourages walking and cycling, just because it is a nice place to be. “What’s key is understanding at an aggregate level, how much we are delivering, but also how much opportunity has been avoided. Because if you’re designing an individual project, it can be quite difficult to argue, when you get to a value engineering stage, which is incredibly important,” explains Sam pointing out that TfL is funded by the taxpayer. “Remember we’re spending public money here, that this additional element of the scheme that might be increasing green infrastructure or biodiversity, should remain in scheme, but if we’re able to show at a program or portfolio level, and ultimately business planning level. This is the sum total of what we’re delivering and the benefits that London sees from that.”
The approach that TfL is taking differs from that of other companies that have made use of the Natural Capital approach. Jennifer explains that a lot of the companies that have started to think about natural capital and how it applies to them as a business, are companies that have a very direct footprint such as mining companies where there’s an obvious visible impact on the environment from their direct operations. “With TfL, it has been really interesting to actually say, OK you’re kind of one step removed, in many cases from that sort of direct impact. And firstly we’ve had to tease out quite carefully the different parts of the different things that TfL does as an organisation, and then the different ways in which that might impact and how they might depend on the environment.”
One of the methodologies is something called a materiality assessment, which looks at a long list of possible things that the organisation might impact and depend on. Internal and external stakeholders were then brought in to help tease out the priorities of those. “And what we found was that biodiversity was recognised as one of the main material impacts for them,” says Jennifer explaining that dependencies were quite closely linked to things like climate. Operating infrastructure in London is reliant on a sort of stable, predictable weather pattern. And where that doesn’t happen, there can be quite bad knock on effects in terms of delivering their transport, and health and safety issues as well.
Part of the process
To embed natural capital into its processes, it was critical to include as many parts of the business as possible. That everyone felt included so that it became a fundamental part of decision making. So, they decided to follow the natural capital protocol, which is split into four main stages. “We completed the first two stages, and they were frame and scope,” says Katherine. the framing part covered ‘why do we want to conduct a natural capital assessment in the first place, why is this important for TFL,’ and then moved on to scope where the team defined the objective, what the scope of the assessment would be. “Which impacts and dependencies would be the most important for us to measure because green infrastructure has so many different benefits and there are so many different ways to affect it,” says Katherine.
For this, they had to be really clear that they couldn’t measure everything. “Nor would we wish to because this is very early days for us,” says Katherine. The third stage was measuring and valuing where TfL had to be very streamlined and clear on which were the most important impacts and dependencies to measure straightaway. The final stage was applying all of this. “So actually, giving it a go, putting it in practice, seeing it through to projects and embedding it in some of our processes.”
Selecting what to measure was one of the things that Jenny and Tom Butterworth, technical director for natural capital at WSP, were able to help them with. Tom explains that TfL’s target was to enhance biodiversity across its portfolio, a concept known as biodiversity net gain. “So the first piece we were asked to do was to help them set a baseline for that, so that they can measure the 10% against that baseline. And then off the back of that, we’ve been working with them to use that baseline to develop natural capital account or the start of a natural capital account,” says Tom.
A biodiversity metric
Biodiversity can be measured absolutely as the number of species or the abundance of those species or combinations of those measures. Defra and Natural England have created a methodology for generating a standardized metric which takes account of the type of habitat and the quality of it and is used to create a biodiversity unit score. Of course this data itself has to be acquired. “How we assess that could be a matter of going out and looking at each individual site and monitoring and checking it, finding out what habitat type it is, and measuring, that will take an awful long time,” says Tom. “But it would also be quite dangerous in the sense that we’re working in very high risk environments very close to train lines or underground lines. So what we did instead to make that a much more rapid assessment, and something that could gather that data in a costly way,”
That cheaper way was to use existing datasets from TfL, but also from the London record center known as GIGL which holds all of that green space information. These were then layered together in a geographic information system to gather data across the whole state. “That leaves a whole load of gaps as well. And those gaps we filled using remote sensing analysis. So we took LIDAR data, other satellite data, combined that and using algorithms, learning algorithms to identify different habitat types,” says Tom.
Other sites such aswoodlands, grasslands, wetlands, and so on.“It’s 1,000s of different polygons of data. So each habitat is identified as a separate polygon. And that’s 10s of 1000s of different polygons. Now, the wonderful thing about GIS systems is that they can manage that amount of data relatively easily. And it’s quite manageable,” says Tom.
The team then consider the value for each parcel, and also for the whole estate and this can be used to inform any development project, any management project, any work on the ongoing operations of the site. “They can use the data to both inform how they could do that, and also understand the impact of that at an individual project scale. And then you can add that together, bringing that data set those datasets back together into an updated assessment across the estate,” says Tom.
The next step for TfL is to use this approach for future planning and to ensure its 25,000 staff contribute to the approach. “So far as we know, TfL is the only organization in the transport sector in the UK, to have really focused on embedding natural capital accounting into our processes and decision making, rather than just having a single project that comes up with a single natural capital number. And I think what’s really encouraging is it sets TfL apart, as a world leader,” says Katherine.
Sam says that the way TfL needsto embed this new approach to natural capital is the same way as other strategic outcomes and regulatory requirements are evaluated, ultimately through TfL’s management system. “So that means we need to have the right training, we need to have the right products and tools that are easy to use, but we’re giving people that feedback about ultimately, what are the outcomes that they’re delivering and also reporting that at the top level,” he says.
Katherine says that she has seen a general increase in awareness and understanding of the importance of green infrastructure within TfL for example through the creation of an internal green infrastructure steering group that represents or includes representatives from a whole range of different stakeholders across the business, which she says is an incredibly useful forum for exchanging ideas and knowledge about what does and doesn’t work. “One of the great benefits of that, and the work that Katherine and her team do on green structured biodiversity is getting external speakers in and getting people from across the business who are kind of interested in stuff to hear from those external speakers ultimately be inspired and that’s where we’ve seen some of the best gains,” says Sam.
These inspiring talks to engineers help them to really get behind this and try and deliver it ahead of actually creating a natural capital account and making it a requirement.
Partner: WSP
