Yorkshire Water owns 280,000,000 square meters of land. By opening up the land to everyone, it hopes to encourage people to spend more time being active outdoors, protect the environment, and inspire younger generations to enjoy nature. To achieve these goals and make better decisions benefiting customers, it is using a capitals approach to quantify the environmental and social impacts of its actions.
Our team has developed an innovative tool that compares the impacts of various land management decisions across the capitals.
Drawing on the latest scientific evidence, it provides a cutting-edge approach to measuring and valuing impacts. We piloted the tool in the ‘Little Don’ area in South Yorkshire to guide the site’s redevelopment as a recreational hub, comparing five different scenarios:
- Inclusive environment: encouraging all groups to interact with the environment
- Active recreation: planting trees and encouraging sports such as mountain biking
- Active biodiversity: protecting and restoring nature
- Sustainable farming: working with farmers to better balance the needs of the environment
- Sustainable forestry: focusing on tree and hedgerow planting across the majority of the site.
The results suggest that encouraging active sports may provide the greatest potential benefits, despite costing more than the other possible scenarios. The results also demonstrate the pros and cons of each scenario, and the existence of important trade-offs between the goals of encouraging visitor diversity, protecting biodiversity, and creating employment opportunities. Yorkshire Water will discuss the results with stakeholders in the Little Don area to decide on a site management approach that meets everyone’s needs. We are now using the tool with Yorkshire Water to help it meet similar land management goals across all of its landholdings.