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.

Documents

What nature can do for you

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 Document updated to fix broken links and out of date email addresses.

  2. First published.