Greengage worked with Wild West End, a partnership between central London’s largest property owners, to help encourage nature back into the heart of London.
The Wild West End (WWE) initiative was set up in 2015 to create a resilient network of connected green spaces and corridors that provide biodiversity, climate resilience, health and wellbeing and economic benefits to the area’s users. The partnership’s common goal is to provide green stepping stones in the form of green infrastructure (GI) that will support the return of nature back into the heart of London. A key output of the WWE partnership is the GI Values Matrix. The GI Values Matrix allows non-technical users to understand the key benefits that GI can provide, which enables them to make smart choices when selecting suitable green features to include in projects.
Greengage’s natural capital specialists co-developed the updated Values Matrix in partnership with members of WWE, holding a series of stakeholder workshops to shape the key components, scoring system and overall vision.
The project involved creation of a new urban specific framework for valuing green infrastructure across the West End, to replace the existing Values Matrix.
The aims of the new Values Matrix
- To help deliver high quality, multifunctional GI.
- To fill a gap by providing a quantitative tool for guiding biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery in urban environments.
- To set a standard for designing ‘good’ GI in the West End.
- To maximise opportunity for multifunctional GI and ecosystem service delivery within development.
- To create a guidance-based matrix to support decision making in GI specification.
- To cater to a wide range of users – accessible and applicable to all.
The updated Values Matrix provides WWE with a bespoke, two-stage approach to assessing the multiple co-benefits which can be delivered via urban greening. The first stage is a simplified matrix which allows identification of ecosystem services needs and corresponding GI types appropriate to the project. It also shows the interfaces between GI specification and ecosystem service benefits e.g. which GI types provide each ecosystem service benefit. The second stage comprises a detailed matrix which provides full guidance, design specification information and scoring via green infrastructure design, supply chain and management guidance.
The tool can be used to deliver specific ecosystem services, such as cooling and shading, flood risk resilience or social interaction, via good GI design, by matching up the required ecosystem service / site-based needs with corresponding GI types and specification guidance to be installed in a project. It can also be used to inform the maximisation of benefit that can be derived from the specific GI that is appropriate to a site, by providing specification guidance that optimises BNG and ecosystem service provision of that GI typology.
The Values Matrix has been created to fill a known gap in biodiversity and ecosystem service valuation tools that do not capture the nuances and nature of highly urban environments such as those covered by WWE. It has been designed to set standards and best practice for GI in the heart of the city that go beyond current urban greening requirements. Critically, the updated Values Matrix provides users with no biodiversity expertise with a simple way of identifying and selecting the most suitable greening interventions for their projects.
