Natural Capital Audit Methodology

In 2023 the GSA Biosphere Partnership was awarded US$25,000 in funding through UNESCO’s grant programme: Promoting sustainable development through UNESCO’s programmes and sites. This funding supported a 12-month collaborative project between GSABP and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) in which we developed a methodology to assess natural capital on farm holdings. By creating natural capital baselines, land management changes can be better informed and farmers better equipped to implement operations that fully integrate both natural capital and business objectives.

Our thanks to UNESCO’s Regional Bureau of Science & Culture in Europe, and to programme funders the abrdn Charitable Foundation, for bringing this project from research to realisation.

The key pillars for auditing are:

Biodiversity

Water footprint

Soil health

Carbon sequestration

Farm inputs and greenhouse gas emissions

Landscape character and access

We compiled over 100 existing natural capital audit tools. We then applied criteria of suitability, trustworthiness, and accessibility to evaluate and differentiate between the tools to narrow down to a short list of just under 40 tools.

The result is a bespoke approach to understanding the natural capital assets of a farm holding that will help farmers and land managers make decisions in a holistic, integrated way that will create multiple benefits in managing their land.

We intend to share this methodology with farmers and land managers, working with them to audit and understand nature on their land in ways to inform management decisions that will benefit the environment and the business.

At home in SW Scotland, we were keen to take the peer-to-peer exchange forward for the benefit of future land managers, and with this intent a curriculum in natural capital was developed and delivered to HNC Agriculture students at SRUC’s Barony Campus.

Representatives from the GSA Biosphere Partnership were proud to attend two programme conferences at UNESCO’s Venice Office to present first our proposal and then the results of methodology research and testing.

UNESCO’s programme was an international peer learning project looking at implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The GSA Biosphere was one of five sites selected to participate in 2023, with other winning proposals coming from UNESCO sites in France, Montenegro, Romania, and the United States. Development of our project, titled Whole Farm Plans for Agricultural Natural Capital Resilience: Audit Methodology, took place during the second year of this three-year programme, which concludes in 2024/25.