Local Action Toolkit

Defra’s Local Action Project aims to work with local communities to enhance the value of natural capital in towns, cities and other urban spaces to improve people’s lives, the environment and
economic prosperity. It takes a partnership approach enabling local communities and groups to develop a vision for where they live and to help them to form effective stakeholder-partnerships that work towards that goal.

As part of the LAP, a framework for the assessment of costs and benefits of catchment management programmes in urban landscapes was been developed. Information gathered has been used to develop a framework for the quantification of benefits resulting from interventions designed to enhance ecosystem service provision or mitigate loss of provision in urban landscapes. This framework is scalable, to ensure that it can be applied to a broad spectrum of urban situations, and includes a widely applicable series of metrics that allow all potential benefits to be measured (whether monetisable value or not).