Natural capital & ecosystem services
Natural Capital is increasingly important for businesses as they seek to manage resource, climate, reputational and ESG challenges, as well as the wider environmental challenges around regulation & compliance, biodiversity net gain and environmental net gain.
Understanding natural capital and ecosystem service impacts and developing a positive approach to natural capital is increasingly important as businesses seek to position themselves to manage the growing range of environmental issues.
Benefits of a Natural Capital approach
A Natural Capital approach can be used to influence all aspects of business strategy and decision making:
- Manages supply chain and value chain risk
- Maintain and enhance reputation
- Drives behaviours
- More engaged workforce
- Better relations with shareholders and regulators
- Business cost savings as well as opportunities
How can we help?
SLR works with organisations to help them understand their environmental impacts, reduce these, and identify opportunities to move towards a positive environmental impact.
We have expertise across all areas of sustainability, environmental impacts, climate change, ecology and biodiversity.
SLR supports organisations in using a Natural Capital approach to understand risks and opportunities.
Natural Capital Services:
- Natural capital strategy
- Natural capital baseline assessments
- Natural capital/ biodiversity training
- Natural capital accounting
- Biodiversity planning
- Ecosystem services assessments
- Habitat planning and monitoring
- Stakeholder engagement
- Environmental impacts and dependencies register
- Environmental improvement action plans
- Environmental impact assessments
- Environmental performance metrics and monitoring
Our team includes
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Sue Swain
Head of Client Management and Industry Sector Leader - Europe
Sue’s background is as a pharmaceutical microbiologist, and she spent her early career in the pharmaceutical industry, and then as a consultant leading a team involved in auditing pharmaceutical facilities globally. Sue’s career then moved to business development, for engineering, construction and environmental companies, and she joined SLR in 2017.
In her role as Industry Sector Lead, Sue and the team are working with manufacturing clients in Europe across a range of subsectors, and in her Client Management role Sue is leading our key client account management team for the European region across all client sectors. Sue is one of the Natural Capital Leads at SLR and this dovetails quite nicely with her client management and industry sector lead role; in that Sue engages with a broad range of clients, and hence has the benefit of seeing many different perspectives in our clients businesses.
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Stewart Lenton
Natural Capital and Nature Lead - Europe
Stewart Lenton is Natural Capital and Nature Lead for Europe at SLR, and also a member of EIC Natural Capital Task Force.
Stewart’s background in planning, coupled with his responsibility for the ecology team, enables him to engage with and guide clients with respect to the new mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain requirements which are part of our planning legislation. As a member of the EIC Natural Capital Task force Stewart interacts with the policy influencers involved in Natural Capital, such as DEFRA, and is able to share this insight about the future horizon for Natural Capital with clients.
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Dr Andrea Wilcockson
Principal Ecologist
Andrea is a Principal Ecologist at SLR in Worcester. She started her career undertaking research on the green veined white butterfly and its potential to adapt to climate change before moving into consultancy. Andrea joined SLR in 2003 and currently manages the south midlands, south-west England and south-east England ecology teams. Andrea is a Full Member of CIEEM and a Chartered Environmentalist.
During her 17 years at SLR Andrea has worked in all Sectors that SLR are involved in. She has worked on projects for renewable energy, waste/landfills, mining, residential, commercial and manufacturing clients across the UK. Andrea is a member of SLR’s Natural Capital Working Group. She has worked on Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) projects since 2012 and considers that the opportunities for environmental benefit that BNG offers will not be as great in isolation and believes Natural Capital offers an opportunity for clients to bring forward the environmental benefits not only for their businesses but for the wider population.
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Ida Bailey
Principal Ecologist
Ida has been professionally involved in ecology relate project management/ research for over a decade, working with a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial species, in the UK, North America and South Africa. She spent her early career gaining a PhD and undertaking several post-doctoral positions focusing on animal cognition and foraging behaviour. Her career then moved in to ecological consultancy. She is a qualified project manager (PRINCE2 Practitioner) an associate member of CIEEM and a member of the Society for Ecological Restoration (Certified Ecological Restoration Practitioner in Training, CERPIT).
Within the past four years Ida has managed the ecological aspects of over 35 projects in Scotland, England, Wales and the USA in: onshore wind (feasibility, EIA, pre-construction, construction and operational phases), grid, forestry, floating solar, conservation, hydroelectric, solar, housing, waste/ landfill, industry and minerals/ mining.
Ida join SLR in 2019. In her role as an associate ecologist Ida is a member of SLR’s Natural Capital Working Group. This is a good fit with her interests in ecosystem services and habitat restoration. Her broad range of experiences and skills allow her to take an innovate, practical approach to problem solving, and she believes that is particularly important in the rapidly developing field of Natural Capital.
