Impact case study database

Since 2010, human population has increased by almost a billion, while terrestrial protected areas have increased globally from to 17.5 million km² to 29 million km² under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. These trends are leading to increasing pressures on land for agricultural, urban and extractive uses (such as mining and forestry) and nature conservation. Defining protected areas therefore involves complex trade-offs between: the intrinsic value of nature; its economic and livelihood value to local, downstream and nearby populations (ecosystem services); land rights; and lost opportunities for other uses of the land, such as energy and food production, and the support of globally important carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Policy support systems that bring together the best available data and knowledge for a locality or country – in a form that is easily used by stakeholders to make their own evidence-based decisions – are in high demand but short supply.

Outputs of King’s research, WaterWorld [building on 1,2,3] and Co$tingNature [building on 4,5,6], have helped to fill this gap by making complex new spatial planning concepts and data sets easily accessible through a user-friendly and free online platform (www.policysupport.org\) to support more effective land-use planning. Together WaterWorld and Co$tingNature provide a one-stop shop for planners, advocates and investors wanting to understand how their proposals will affect a wide range of ecosystem services and their beneficiaries. As outlined below, the tools have wide reach, significantly affecting the capacity of a range of organisations to take evidence-based land-use decisions.

A. Reaching land-use decision-makers around the world

Co$tingNature and WaterWorld have been disseminated through user engagement and through the marketing and delivery of training in person or online. The tools have been used by more than 3500 organisations from a wide range of areas, including government, commercial and international organisations, as well as the non-governmental sector, across over 183 countries. They have either replaced other tools or provided actionable information where none were available previously.

The tools are now included in key sector and industry toolkits such as those from: World Business Council on Sustainable Development (200 companies, revenue USD8.5 trillion, 19 million employees) [A1], Ecosystems Knowledge Network [A2], CGIAR Solutions [A3], The Natural Capital Protocol [A4], Business for Social Responsibility (270 companies) [A5], Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance standards [A6], Association of Wetland Managers [A7], SDG knowledge hub [A8], DEFRA [A9], World Resources Institute [A10], UN Food and Agriculture Organization [A11], US National Ecosystem Services partnership [A12], IUCN [A13].

The tools are self-financing (with some organisations paying for commercial use) and research projects fund their further development. All users provide feedback on how they use the tools, with more than 100 case studies of model application written by users since 2014 [B1–4] and over 770 responses to the user feedback form. Based on this feedback, the tools have supported decisions at both national scale (Fig 1a) and local scale (Fig 1b) around the world, and on a diverse range of land-use related topics.

| Fig 1a. Countries and basins in which King’s tools supported analyses at regional scale | Fig 1b. Sites at which King’s tools supported analyses at local scale | | --- | --- |

B. Supporting land-use decisions of local and regional significance

The Co$tingNature and WaterWorld policy support systems provide new metrics, models and curated global datasets that support a wide range of land-use decisions. Here we give examples of their significance in decision-making by three important international users:

(i) Better prioritisation of conservation areas

The international NGO Conservation International has used Co$tingNature to highlight the hitherto unrecognised (and hence unvalued) ecosystem services provided by existing protected areas. Conservation International’s Vice-President for Global Solutions explains that the “tools help us to better prioritise geographies for conservation investments, test the impact of conservation interventions and support local stakeholders in scenario analysis … Co$ting Nature has influenced our investment decisions and helped us to raise more funding for particular areas” [C]. For example, “one of the most important drivers in securing the funding [for a new 1.5 million ha protected area in Bolivia] was our Amazon Strategy and in particular the freshwater priority of this area identified by WaterWorld and Co$ting Nature” [C]. In Colombia, “the use of WaterWorld has been fundamental to add robust technical information to evaluate the implementation feasibility of these [mining and infrastructure] projects” [B1]. At a regional level, Conservation International used both WaterWorld and Co$tingNature to produce maps and spatial datasets that identified the most important areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services in support of multiple partners building a regionally integrated vision for Amazonia’s sustainable development [B2,C]. Conservation International have also used Co$tingNature outputs with companies (e.g. Kering, Walmart, Mastercard) to identify priority areas for conservation, restoration and improved management within the spatial footprint of their supply chains [C]. Without these tools the sophisticated concepts of ecosystem services could not be factored into this decision-making.

(ii) Supporting governments to make better decisions on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+)

For the United Nations Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), an important recent focus has been the use of the tools to support governments in planning multi-billion dollar REDD+ (forest protection) programmes [D]. WaterWorld is promoted by UN-REDD, the main global programme supporting nationally-led REDD+ processes, as a tool for governments to determine how land-use change promoted or prevented by REDD+ investments will affect downstream water quantity and quality [E]. WCMC has been instrumental in training government staff in countries including Colombia, Honduras, Madagascar, Mongolia, Kenya, Nepal and Vietnam to use WaterWorld to evaluate the importance of forests for water provision and soil erosion mitigation, informing decisions about the location of REDD+ investments in those countries [B3,B4,D]. Without these tools, decision-makers would often be blind to the potential negative impacts of REDD+ investments on water and other ecosystem services.

(iii) Evaluating impacts of past land-use decisions to inform future investments

A senior economic adviser at the Inter-American Development Bank (speaking in his personal capacity) found “WaterWorld to be a very useful tool for testing the impacts of and prioritising investments in green infrastructure” [F]. For example, the Bank used WaterWorld to evaluate three forest conservation investments in Ecuador and Brazil, which were funded through the Latin American Water Funds Partnership, a consortium of more than 40 local initiatives aimed at improving the quality and quantity of water flows to metropolitan areas by investing in nature conservation [F]. WaterWorld was used to model (and value) the effect on water quality of the deforestation avoided by the projects and, in particular, to model the effect of this conservation versus the counterfactual (business-as-usual) land-use change on water quality at water-treatment plant intake points. Understanding the water quality impact of past investments “led us to make recommendations about how Water Funds projects can maximise net benefits by improving spatial targeting of their investments in natural infrastructure” [F].

(iv) Enabling sophisticated spatial analyses for land-use investments has improved policy and practice

All three organisations emphasise the significant impact these world-leading tools have had on their policy and practice. As outlined by the Vice-President of Conservation International, “without these tools we would be reliant on collecting datasets and producing new and separate analyses for each and every local and regional conservation project. The tools provide us with a rapid and consistent methodology that can be applied across all geographies, but still recognises local geographical detail” [C]. The ease of use of the tools is appreciated because it means that they can be used by staff with “less GIS experience, ensuring those who best understand policy questions and conservation context can also run the required spatial analyses, a key advantage over other more technical approaches” [F]. Furthermore, the tools are simple enough that partner organisations can be trained to undertake future work independently [D]. WCMC’s Director states that Co$tingNature’s capacity to map and value 18 different ecosystem services “has supported a broadening of our prioritisation work beyond biodiversity and carbon. The embedded land use model within WaterWorld and Co$tingNature, coupled with the extensive multi-scenario capability of WaterWorld in particular, has helped us to deliver more varied and comprehensive scenario analyses, based on stakeholder input, quickly and cheaply… Use of Co$tingNature ….has also brought new concepts to our work such as realised vs potential ecosystem services, bundled ecosystem service metrics, as well as novel metrics in water quality, quantity and regulation and, more recently, nature’s contribution to the SDGs. These tools are at the forefront of all these conceptual developments and support our own world-leading expertise in these areas” [D].