Natural Economy Northwest (NENW): Green Infrastructure Demonstrator Project
Natural Economy Northwest (NENW) is a regional partnership programme led by Natural England, the North West Development Agency and the SITA Trust on behalf of a wide range of economic and environmental partners. The main focus is to deliver priority action 113 in the Regional Economic Strategy: to optimise the contribution of the natural environment to the regional economy and quality of life. The programme includes working with an array of environmental and economic partners to mainstream the natural environment within sustainable economic development. In the course of the programme substantial expertise as well as methods, tools, processes and knowledge have been developed concerning green infrastructure, the services it provides, potential benefits and beneficiaries, and ways of valuing and enhancing these benefits.
For EMBED, there are potentially important lessons to be learned from this demonstrator project that have relevance for spatial planning authorities throughout England and Wales. Of interest is the capacity of an ecosystems approach to be used constructively and pro-actively to help in designing schemes that add to the quality of local environments used by large numbers of people, to lower the risks and overall economic costs of adapting to climate change and other threats, to identify a stream of public and private benefits that enable projects to be (at least in part) paid for by beneficiaries, and to deliver investment funds.
