We have launched the first Natural Capital Laboratory of its kind, located on a 100-acre site near Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. The five-year living laboratory will document the rewilding of the site’s natural environment, allowing us to test and trial experimental new technologies to help measure and monitor environmental change.
With increasing prominence of natural capital accounting in UK policy-making, there is growing demand for public and private sector organisations to better account for their environmental and social impacts.
While there are already tools, techniques and support available for organisations looking to measure, manage and value their natural assets, the natural capital laboratory will be a real-world, practical demonstration of how to apply a natural capital approach.
Working with the landowners, their local advisors and conservation charity The Lifescape Project, the site’s natural environment will be restored, bringing back native forest, engaging local communities and reintroducing locally extinct species with the aim of identifying and demonstrating the environmental and social benefits of rewilding. Over the next five years, we will design and test experimental new techniques to quantify, measure and communicate environmental and social change, applying cutting-edge technologies such as drones, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality and space satellites. The accounts will take a wider capitals approach, incorporating natural, social, human, intellectual, manufactured and financial capital. This will allow the accounts to go beyond focusing on environmental change to also encompass impacts on a range of social and economic issues such as job creation, skills development, volunteering opportunities, health and wellbeing, knowledge creation, education opportunities and building local community networks.