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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Dave Hall
Technical Director
Dave has 15 years’ experience in environmental survey and management ranging from academic research to consulting. Dave has extensive experience developing practical solutions to manage environmental constraints in support of environmental approvals. His work routinely involves fauna surveys, habitat assessments, vegetation community surveys and mapping, targeted surveys for threatened species, aquatic ecology baseline studies and environmental monitoring programs (terrestrial and aquatic). He has prepared numerous technical reports, impact assessments, management plans, rehabilitation programs, and biodiversity offset strategies.
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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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Scott Walker
Technical Director
Scott is a Technical Director Ecologist with over 24 years of experience in environmental consulting and scientific research. His early experience included research that has provided him with the technical background necessary to lead and manage ecological teams in the performance of scientifically robust ecological surveys and investigations. Scott directs teams of scientists to achieve client’s goals and he has managed and delivered numerous technical survey projects throughout Western Australia. Scott also has expertise in agriculture and agroforestry through plant water relations and nutrient research.
