LOCAL ACTION TOOLKIT

Local Action Project

Defra’s Local Action Project (LAP) took a partnership approach designed to enable local communities and civil society groups to discover their vision for where they live and to help them to form effective stakeholder-partnerships that can realise this.

The LAP was funded by Defra (project number: WT1580) and ran from March 2015 to May 2016. The project was led by the Westcountry Rivers Trust who have extensive experience of evaluating ecosystem services and working in partnership with a variety of stakeholders. The Project Board contained members from Defra, the Environment Agency, Natural England, Natural Resources Wales and Imperial College London.

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Demonstration Area: Manchester

Initial Outputs Summary Presentation

The Defra Local Action Project has been working with local communities to enhance the value of natural capital in our towns, cities and other urban spaces to improve people’s lives, the environment & economic prosperity.

For each Demonstration Area we have developed a suite of evidence and information resources to support the targeting and implementation of environmental management or enhancement actions in urban landscapes.

On the 18th April 2016 the Westcountry Rivers Trust delivery team met with several key stakeholders and practitioners who work in Manchester to examine the preliminary outputs of the Local Action Project.

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  Click download button to access pdf of slides.

Urban practitioner’s ‘toolbox’ of interventions

An intervention-based cost-benefit assessment framework

As part of the Local Action Project, a framework for the assessment of costs and benefits of catchment management programmes in urban landscapes has 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).

The list of interventions was compiled by reviewing existing typologies of green infrastructure components and sustainable drainage systems. They were categorised into ‘existing assets’ and ‘interventions’ based on the likelihood of being implemented as a new feature.

  Click download button to access pdf of toolbox document.