Guidance

What nature can do for you

A practical introduction to making the most of natural services, assets and resources in policy and decision making.

• From: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
• Published: 1 April 2013
• Last updated: 20 January 2015 — See all updates

Documents

What nature can do for you

Ref: pb13897

PDF, 623 KB

Details

This guide is designed to help policy makers across Government to understand:

• The value of what nature does for you now,
• The costs and risks we are leaving ourselves open to if we fail to take the value of its services into account in our decisions,
• How you can work with natural systems to help you deliver efficiently in the future.

The guide is focussed on helping policy makers to put this into practice and includes:

• A clear explanation of the principles of an ecosystems approach
• Details on how an ecosystems approach can help policy makers to take account of the value of the natural environment at every stage of the policy making process
• 1 hour of essential reading to help readers quickly get up to speed on this issue
• A ‘self-assessment’ to help policy makers to see how they are doing already and what could be gained by doing more to understand how the natural environment interacts with their policy issue
• Sign-posting to a range of detailed resources, case-studies and further reading on specific topics such as valuation and systematic thinking.

Published 1 April 2013
Last updated 20 January 2015 + show all updates

1. 20 January 2015

   Document updated to fix broken links and out of date email addresses.

2. 1 April 2013

   First published.