Spatial prioritisation involves figuring out the best actions to take on a piece of land by looking at how an action might work for that land or how an action helps important local environmental priorities. By doing this, spatial prioritisation identifies where we can get multiple benefits from these actions, helping to make more progress towards our national environmental targets. JNCC is developing a spatial prioritisation approach that uses available evidence to provide useful information to someone deciding how to manage land.
Context
There is strong evidence that land management practices are driving nature’s decline. Ambitious policy targets at global and national levels highlight the scale of the challenges we face. Not all land can provide the same benefits, so land managers and policymakers must make decisions based on what each piece of land is best suited to deliver.
New environmental land management schemes can offer crucial financial mechanisms to increase the uptake of beneficial actions. We rely on land for food, fibre, livelihoods, and the environmental services that support them. Therefore, we must balance these needs to ensure positive outcomes for society.
Producing sufficient food to ensure food security and safeguarding or restoring environmental services, such as flood prevention and biodiversity, comes from a limited amount of land. To achieve balance, the landscape will need to be multifunctional, providing multiple benefits for people and nature. Striking this balance is a significant task, but it is achievable with the right actions in the right place at the right scale, bringing multiple benefits for us all.
To support a transition to multifunctional landscapes which delivers against several societal and policy priorities, JNCC has developed an approach called 'Spatial Prioritisation'. The approach involves systematically identifying and ranking interventions, at a land parcel level, based on their potential impact, suitability, and opportunities to achieve outcomes across multiple ecosystems services.
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What is spatial prioritisation and why is it important?
Spatial Prioritisation involves systematically identifying and ranking possible interventions that could be taken on a land parcel, based on their suitability and potential impact on the delivery of locally important ecosystem services, highlighting the opportunities where multiple benefits can be achieved.
For example, spatial prioritisation might involve identifying areas where tree planting plans could be designed to enhance carbon sequestration, but also improve water quality and provide habitat for biodiversity. Spatial prioritisation is different to spatial targeting. Targeting refers to the strategic placement of single interventions in specific geographic areas to achieve single outcomes like planting water body buffers alongside a river to reduce run off.
Embedding spatial prioritisation in decision making will support getting the right thing, in the right place, at the right scale to help deliver against policy targets and show where greater environmental impacts are likely to be achieved, with the additional benefit of delivering better value for money. This is especially important for farmers and land managers who pick from a long list of interventions they can take on their land through agri-environment schemes. In England, their choices play a key role in meeting the targets in the Environmental Improvement Plan (2023), which ultimately contributes to UK-wide progress toward the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
JNCC is working to develop an analytical process that balances the multiple, and sometimes competing, policy priorities: our finite amount of land and limited budget, as well as food production needs. This puts information in the hands of decision makers by helping identify interventions that can deliver more or wider environmental outcomes on land. This concept is called 'Spatial Prioritisation'.
Taking a natural capital approach
Our Spatial Prioritisation approach uses a natural capital framework (Defra 2023) to categorize the environment into assets like woodlands, wetlands, and peatland. These assets provide essential ecosystem services for example, flood regulation, pollination, and water purification. Interventions such as creating water body buffering or managing species-rich grassland can directly enhance these assets and services depending on where they are placed, or actions might reduce pressures, both ultimately increasing the benefits assets provide to society.
Given the importance of getting these assets into the right place or into better condition, it’s important to know, at a field or land parcel level, what benefits interventions might have. The analytical approach we’ve been developing looks at the likely impact interventions might have on the delivery of ecosystem services and if there are any ecosystem services that are particularly important in that land parcel. For instance, fields near to important populations of upland breeding birds could deliver different benefits than those from fields directly upstream of a protected area that is in poor condition due to pollution. Through ranking interventions that can be taken on a land parcel based on the impact the intervention is likely to have, Spatial Prioritisation can therefore help land managers and policy makers to choose actions that deliver more benefits for people and nature.
The Analytical Pipeline – how we spatially prioritise
Below is a brief outline of the five key steps taken during the Spatial Prioritisation process to identify what intervention is the right thing, in the right place, at the right scale.
1. Where do we want to deliver ecosystem services?
Priority maps are created to identify high priority locations where it is important to maintain and increase the delivery of an ecosystem service.
2. Where can interventions be undertaken?
Location-based eligibility mapping analyses the presence of existing assets, environmental conditions, legal/administrative barriers and protected site boundaries to create mapped layers representing where it is feasible to undertake interventions.
3. What is the expected impact of the intervention?
Impact assessment involves evaluating the potential impact of each intervention on the delivery of ecosystem services.
4. Combine all three steps
Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) (DCLG 2009) combines the three steps above to produce a list of options for a given land parcel ranked by their likely ability to deliver environmental benefits. The MCDA takes a list of feasible interventions from Step 2 (eligibility mapping) and combines it with their potential impact scores on each ecosystem service from Step 3, using the priority maps from Step 1 to weight these scores based on the relative importance of each ecosystem service in that location. The result is a ranked list of interventions, highlighting those which could deliver multiple, locally important, ecosystem services in that location. National or local policy priorities, such as 25 Year Environment Plan Targets or Local Nature Recovery Strategies, can also be included here to help prioritise certain ecosystem services over others.
Applications of the approach
The spatial prioritisation approach is designed to help consider co-benefits of land use at a range of scales and could be incorporated into many areas of land use decision making and planning. We’d welcome hearing about ways you think that Spatial Prioritisation could be applied in your work area. Please sign up to our mailing list for further updates on the project.
Our evidence outputs and products
Throughout the development process we have created multiple evidence products to help inform and communicate our approach to Spatial Prioritisation. Please see the links below for more information and check back regularly for updates to these.
Conference attendence
JNCC has attended several academic conferences to share our approach and widen our engagement with the academic community. For example, we recently presented a poster at events run by the British Ecological Society and Zoological Society of London. You can find more about the conferences we attend by signing up to our mailing list.
Coming soon – Review of Land Use Decision Support Tools
JNCC has commissioned a review of the analytical methods used by land use decision support tools that prioritise or optimise interventions to deliver environmental benefits. This review considered many land use tools and models and assessed them against several criteria including whether or not it included a spatial element and which ecosystem services were considered. JNCC will shortly be publishing this review with updates shared via our mailing list.
Priority maps
As we continue to develop our analytical process, new analytical outputs will be published and shared on this page as well as via our our mailing list.
Definitions
| Term | Definition |
| Land management interventions | Changes made to land management to improve living conditions of people and the environment (Chigbu 2013). Examples in England are the Sustainable Farming Incentive paying for actions like habitat strips next to watercourses or managing rough grazing for birds |
| Agri-environment schemes | Voluntary schemes that pay land managers to manage their land in a more environmentally friendly way (Natural England 2009) |
| Natural capital assets | The stock of natural resources which includes geology, soil, air, water and all living things. These building blocks are the foundation of what delivers ecosystem services |
| Ecosystem services | The benefits that people obtain from ecosystems. These services include provisioning services (e.g. food and water), regulating services (such as flood control), cultural services (such as recreational opportunities), and supporting services (such as nutrient cycling). |
Useful references
Defra. 2023. Enabling a Natural Capital Approach (ENCA): Guidance.
Chigbu, U.E. 2019. What is Land Management Intervention. In: M. El-Ayachi & L. El Mansouri. Geospatial Technologies for Effective Land Governance, IGC Scientific Publishing, pp 1–14. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5939-9.ch001.
Natural England. 2009. Farming with Nature: Agri-environment schemes in action., Natural England, ISBN 978-1-84754-183-3.
Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). 2009. Multi-criteria analysis: a manual, Communities and Local Government Publications, Wetherby, ISBN 978-1-4098-1023-0, 165 pp.
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To keep up to date with our Spatial Prioritisation work, please sign up to our mailing list.
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