Natural Capital in Oxfordshire
This is a short report of the method used to generate preliminary Natural Capital maps for Oxfordshire. The work was undertaken under an Oxford Policy Exchange Network fellowship, funded by the University of Oxford. This fellowship enabled a researcher to work with Oxfordshire County Council, with support from Cherwell District Council, developing evidence on natural capital to feed into development of the Oxfordshire Plan to 2050.
Natural capital maps were developed using a habitat scoring system (see summary diagram below), which is a simple and rapid method to allow spatial patterns to be identified. The method has been adapted from work being carried out by Natural England to develop an eco-metric scoring tool for assessing net gains or losses in natural capital due to land use change. This work is not a detailed natural capital assessment, and it does not produce monetary values that can be compared across different services. It is intended to be a first step that can be extended into more detailed assessments in future.
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