Working Capital
I enjoy getting out and about at the weekends to explore our wonderfully diverse country and often head for the hills or a rural riverside to immerse myself in nature. Recently, though, I ventured into the unfamiliar territory of industrial Teesmouth and I was astonished to find it teeming with curlew.
The backdrop of oil refineries, power stations and wind turbine assembly sites connected by a web of pipelines and cables makes an unattractive setting, yet in between the grimy monoliths there are pockets of grazed marsh, coastal grassland, mudflats and sand dunes providing a home to thousands of birds, insects, plants and mammals. These areas are so important that they include a National Nature Reserve and are designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest and Ramsar sites.
On my mid-March walk I saw flocks of pochard grazing and dabbling, starlings swooping by and oystercatchers feeding while lapwings kept watch, but it was the sheer number of curlew that amazed me. Their distinctive call could be heard all over the marsh and every sweep with my binoculars revealed another pair here and three or four more over there, wonderfully camouflaged against the dull winter green-brown vegetation. Some of these birds will head inland soon, to breed in the Durham Dales or the North York Moors where their calls are the sound of summer.
Curlew at North Gare NNR, with wind turbine assembly site in the background
© Kate Russell 2022
As an Agricultural Valuer, if you had asked me ten years ago what this land was worth, I might have said “not much”: too wet to build on (even if it wasn’t designated), not much value in the grazing and no chance of a tourism venture in this location. More of a liability than an asset, probably. But I see it now through different eyes and try to contemplate its natural capital value:
Biodiversity – Clearly this area has real value for its biodiversity, not just here on the coast but as part of the wider ecosystem connected to the remote, rural moorlands that seem a world away, enabling the curlew and others to find what they need in habitat and food supply all year round.
Health and recreation – On a blustery March afternoon there were families with young children, dog walkers and twitchers stretching their legs on the paths. With a large urban population on the doorstep, sites like this are very valuable for providing access to the outdoors and informal recreation opportunities. There’s even a golf course behind the dunes for those who like a more structured form of recreation.
Climate mitigation – there is much interest in how we assess the amount of carbon being sequestered by our marshes and grasslands and work is underway on a UK Soils Carbon Code, but we have now at least started to recognise the potential of the land to provide this important ecosystem service.
Water quality and flood mitigation – coastal wetlands can help to mitigate the flow and act as important water storage and filtration areas as part of a fully functioning catchment.
So what is it worth, you may ask. Environmental economists have developed tools to ascribe a value to each of these services and more besides. They may sometimes produce pretty odd-looking answers with figures that seem unrealistically high, but they provide a starting point for a conversation about what this land provides to wider society and why it should be valued for what it does.
How do we capture that value? That’s harder to answer and it’s a question that many are wrestling with as we try to fit non-market goods into our market-driven economy. There is a place for market mechanisms and there is growing interest in combining carbon and biodiversity credits into high quality and assured “products” for investors, but perhaps in time we will understand the value in investing in our natural capital not for financial return, but because we recognise that our very futures depend on it.
14th March 2022