Innovate UK awarded City Science in partnership with Caerphilly County Borough Council (Caerphilly) grant funding to deliver a tool that supports investment for nature. Our ‘The Nature Investment Land Assessment Tool’ project will seek to integrate sites for nature within the local planning process. Caerphilly are supporting us with navigating the planning process in Wales, gaining insight into how local authorities navigate sites for nature, and designing a tool for officers to justify nature-based solutions.
Our stakeholder engagement will be fundamental to the creation of the tool, through which we will:
- Engage with Caerphilly’s officers to understand the intricacies of their local plan process.
- Engage with investors to understand what they’re looking for from sites for nature.
- Carry out design solution workshops to identify user needs and how the tool can best address them.
The tool will look to integrate with our flagship GIS web-based platform, Cadence, enabling users to explore the land use, habitat, vegetation, and contextual data geospatially. Users will be able to identify sites that might be suitable for investment in nature restoration/regeneration. Our tool will outline financial revenue that could be created from sites of nature/biodiversity to highlight the potential options to investors and highlight the value of ecosystem services.
Housing, energy, infrastructure, and transport have competing interests on land, but few quantitative frameworks currently exist, including in Wales, that allow for nature to be given equal footing. Our tool will have a quantitative approach to planning and identifying land that is best suited to nature (with additional consideration for dual land use sites).
We look forward to working collaboratively with Caerphilly, enabling investment into nature restoration, and supporting nature advocacy within local regions.
