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Guidance

Enabling a Natural Capital Approach (ENCA): Guidance

Enabling a Natural Capital Approach (ENCA) guidance is a comprehensive document providing information and resources for Natural Capital.

Updates to this page

From:
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
Published:
22 January 2020
Last updated:
10 February 2026
Show all updates

  1. Updated ENCA guidance to align with the updated Green Book (2026).

  2. Fixed an error with the numbering of subheadings in the PDF. Clarification on the updates published on 22 January 2025 - these updates included additional guidance on valuing biodiversity (section 2.8), proportionality in appraisal (section 3.4), and generating new income streams (section 5.5).

  3. 'Enabling a Natural Capital Approach guidance' attachments have been updated.

  4. This guidance has been updated to make it clearer, more concise and provide more up to date information.

  5. Updated ENCA guidance to reflect changes to reflecting developments in the evidence base and in improvements in response to user feedback. This includes new signposting for users approaching the guidance for the first time, new material included in Section 5 on natural capital planning, mapping and tools and a new Annex 1 showing how ENCA can inform different topics of interest.

  6. Updated guidance document with improvements for accessibility.

  7. First published.

Documents

Enabling a Natural Capital Approach guidance (accessible)

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Enabling a Natural Capital Approach guidance (PDF)

PDF, 759 KB, 94 pages

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Details

ENCA guidance is a comprehensive document providing information and resources for Natural Capital. It covers:

  • the natural capital framework
  • economic valuation of the environment
  • how project or policy appraisal can incorporate natural capital
  • natural capital accounting principles and methods, benefits and challenges
  • applying natural capital at a local level

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