Coalition didn’t see wood for trees
Ever since I did some work on the East of England coast I have become increasingly fascinated by the challenge of attaching meaningful public policy monetarised values to natural assets. In the case of that work we were considering issues arising from the difficult choices of whether and how to protect against coastal erosion. This story, which comes from a different angle, identifies the same challenge but in terms of trees rather than seas! The article says
“The benefits of England’s publicly owned forests were “greatly undervalued” by the planned state sell-off, a government-appointed panel will say on Thursday in a report that deals a new blow to the coalition’s green credentials.
The independent report, seen by the Guardian, says the £20m cost to the state of maintaining the forests and woodlands is “very modest and delivers benefits far in excess of this” and contrasts the sum with the £250m spent on reinstating weekly bin collections.
The independent panel on forestry, led by the bishop of Liverpool, the Right Rev James Jones, was set up after the humiliating U-turn on the proposed sell-off by the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, whose department had suffered the biggest budget cut inWhitehall.”
We need to get smarter and more focused in the application of this type of analysis and to develop the skills to do it at the local level if we are to produced rounded policies in the context of the natural assets we manage for communities.