We've helped to develop a guide for peatland restoration practitioners and anyone interested in peatlands to value the socio-economic benefits of their restoration. The ‘User Guide’ was developed as part of the Yorkshire integrated Catchment Solutions Programme (iCASP) together with Yorkshire Peat Partnership (YPP) and the University of Leeds.
This interactive tool provides an overview of the methods available for valuing the benefits provided by peatlands and an understanding of how to apply them in practice. It also draws the picture of the existing evidence on these benefits, which will help peatland practitioners make the case for investment in peatland restoration.
How can this User Guide help you?
You might want to better understand which method to apply to value a particular ecosystem service provided by peatlands and how costly/difficult is it to implement. Using case study examples, the guide describes in a simple way various valuation methods available, what they entail and how they can be used to value different types of ecosystem services.
You might be interested in finding out how values of ecosystem services can be used to inform decisions on your restoration plans, for example in cost-benefit analysis, or the design of incentive mechanisms to finance peatland restoration, such as payments for ecosystem services. The guide illustrates these two!
Or, you might just want to get a picture of the existing evidence on the value of benefits in order to strengthen your argument when writing business cases, making investment plans, or simply communicating the social value of peatland to the public and policy makers. The guide highlights relevant evidence from existing valuation studies.
The User Guide gives you plenty of tips for applying each method, highlights what you should be particularly careful about, and provides access to a large amount of additional resources!
You can download the User Guide at: https://icasp.org.uk/resources/peat-resources/
We would appreciate you sending us feedback on how you use or intend to use the guide. This would be very valuable to us!! Please do so by writing a short note to icasp@leeds.ac.uk.