Making the most of communities' natural assets: green infrastructure

Working with nature - sustaining nature's community service

To sustain nature's benefits for people, it is important that we reflect these benefits in making decisions about how we use and manage land for communities. Applying an ecosystems approach allows decision-makers to do this. An ecosystems approach is a holistic approach for integrating management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. The Scottish Government has identified three principles or steps which together enable decision-makers to apply an ecosystems approach to land use:

1. Understand how nature works and how decisions affect nature and the benefits it provides. This means working with nature rather than against it, and often thinking in the long term and at a wider scale. It involves identifying the natural assets, or green infrastructure, that underpin nature's benefits, how they are inter-connected and how best to manage them. It also means understanding how proposals could impact on natural systems and avoiding exceeding environmental limits such as for pollution or habitat loss which could lead to knock-on effects on other natural assets. It is an iterative rather than one-off approach, involving adaptive management which responds to lessons learnt and to new information such as the effects of climate change.

2. Take account of all the multiple benefits that nature provides. An integrated, holistic and cross-sectoral approach is likely to be most successful. The values of some of these benefits can be accounted for by using economic and other measures to inform policies. Understanding all of the benefits nature provides can inform priorities for investing in improving natural assets to enhance these benefits.

3. Involve local people and communities and value their special knowledge and perspectives on why greenspace is important to them. Help communities and land managers to develop a vision that sustains their natural assets.