Natural England

FAQs

Where is it coming from, what is the 'agenda' behind it?

The initial main spur to the development of the (then) Environmental Capital approach was concern that there was no systematic way to define what matters across all aspects of the environment - the qualitative and subjective aspects as well as those based on 'hard' science; the 'ordinary' areas without any formal protection or status as well as the designated special areas - and to make sure that this full range of environmental values was reflected consistently and fairly in decision processes.   

This subsequently provoked thought about whether other kinds of 'capital' - social, economic, personal, intellectual, 'network', etc.- should be put on the same footing, or even indeed managed together with environmental capital. Further research has concluded that they can and should.

Quality of life can be understood in terms of having a wide range of human needs satisfied. The satisfiers of these needs are (or at least can conveniently be thought of as) services. It would be widely agreed that these services have environmental, social and economic aspects. Services can be thought of as the benefits that flow from the existence of some sort of stock or capital. A decision support tool that considered all these stocks or capitals in an explicit, transparent, coherent and integrated way might reasonably be hoped to help us reach better decisions than the current ramshackle, piecemeal, inconsistent and often disguised treatment of environmental, social and economic objectives in decision and planning processes. 

Moreover the environmental benefits and services which QoL Assessment manages are, to be precise, social and (in some cases) economic benefits to people which happen to depend on environmental assets. It is not a very large conceptual step from appraising these to appraising other social and economic benefits which happen to depend on economic assets such as money invested and factories, or social ones such as a community's level of trust and capacity to work cooperatively.