HM Treasury

This project focuses on three interlinked unresolved issues: how to (a) robustly measure the biodiversity impacts, positive and negative, of business and governmental investments; (b) reconcile commitments to invest in biodiversity improvement with the economic and social welfare of people most affected by them; and (c) deliver sustained, socially just, welfare improvements together with biodiversity gains at the landscape level. Answering these questions is critical for UK government strategy, and for meeting international biodiversity targets and aspirations. With regard to (a), scalable approaches to measuring biodiversity for governmental/industry end-users are still unavailable, but are fundamental to making progress. Scientific approaches to measuring biodiversity both remotely and in situ are costly, time intensive and not easily integrated into actionable metrics. More info here.

The HM Treasury Biodiversity Working Group is responsible for guidance for the assessment of public sector spending (the Treasury ‘Green Book’) in relation to incorporating and accounting for biodiversity across all government spending. This will be a key way in which the Dasgupta Review’s recommendations are operationalised by the UK government. Concomitantly, businesses have ambitious plans to report and reduce their impacts on nature (e.g. through commitments to Biodiversity Net Gain). However, operationalising these bold visions and commitments to nature is a major challenge.