Critical natural assets, UK & Ireland: the map worth building | Part I

”You're not shy, you get around You want to fly, don't want your feet on the ground You stay up, you won't come down You want to live, you want to move to the sound Got fire in your veins Burning hot, but you don't feel the pain Your desire is insane You can't stop until you do it again But sometimes I wonder as I look in your eyes Maybe you're thinking of some other guy But I know, yes I know, how to treat you right That's why you call me in the middle of the night You say it's urgent So urgent, so oh-oh urgent Just wait and see How urgent my love can be It's urgent”

‘Urgent’ by Foreigner, released in 1981 with the amazing sax solo from Motown legend, Junior Walker

I'm super grateful to Elena Doms for pointing out this excellent paper. Elena is spot on about the paper's importance, and right to be excited by it. I want to take her question further than a mere reply post had room to.

The study she highlighted this week, from Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer and colleagues in Nature Ecology & Evolution, is, in my view, one of the better things to happen to natural capital evidence in years, and it does something more careful than its headline suggests. Across the planet, at 2km resolution, it maps the natural systems that deliver 90% of what nature does for people, and it splits them in two. The contributions whose benefits stay local, downstream water quality, flood and sediment regulation, coastal protection, access to nature, it optimises country by country. The two that accrue globally, vulnerable ecosystem carbon and the rainfall that vegetation recycles downwind, it optimises across the whole planet. The key finding that leapt out is that 30% of land carries the local services, rising to 44% once the climate-regulating, global pair is added, against the paltry 15% currently protected. The finding that matters sits underneath it: these benefits have a geography, and for the local services that geography is small, legible, and traceable to the people downstream who receive them.

So Elena's closing question is the right one. If we have the map, and we have the numbers, why isn't this an investment priority yet? The uncomfortable answer is that the map was never the bottleneck. We have had versions of it for a decade, refined steadily since the first global ecosystem-service models. What we have not had is a price, and the reason is not missing data.

It is simply that most of these benefits are public goods, and the UK's Climate Change Committee said precisely that in its fourth climate risk assessment last month. Flood protection and the bulk of adaptation benefits are deemed non-excludable and non-rival, so private actors will not yet fund them at the level required, and the state has to step in. The land chapter gives the practical version of the same problem: restoration is paid for up front, the benefits arrive years later, and they are spread across many parties with no mechanism to charge any one of them. A map of where the assets sit does not tell you who will pay to keep them working. These are two different documents, and the sector keeps mistaking the first for the second.

This is where the paper earns more credit than it tends to get, because it has already drafted half of the second document. For each local service it draws the benefitting population, the people downstream of a given pixel by hydrological flow, those inside the floodplain, those within the protective distance of a coastal habitat. That delineation is an excludability map in all but name. It identifies, service by service, whose welfare depends on the asset, which is the first thing you need before you can ask any of them to pay.

The work, then, is not more mapping. It is taking the subset of these services whose beneficiaries can be named and charged, and turning it into a contractible claim at catchment scale. Not all of them qualify - a great deal of diffuse flood protection genuinely is a public good and will stay on the public balance sheet, where it belongs. But the financeable subset is real and concentrated: the water company carrying treatment and supply risk above a degrading catchment, or the insurer holding a flood book it can no longer price as Flood Re winds down to its 2039 close. Making that dependence excludable and contractible is the product. Most of what I have watched fail in this market has been an attempt to sell the map instead of building that.

Three things have shifted since May that I think make the argument harder to wave away. As evidenced during LCAW 2026, the demand is now official and increasingly costed. The same assessment puts the UK's adaptation bill at around £11 billion a year, of which the Committee expects roughly 41% to come from private capital, against returns it measures in the tens of billions. And it is blunt that physical climate risk, on a path to between 1% and 5% of GDP by 2050, is mispriced across the financial system. The Bank of England's own scenario work runs bank credit losses and insurer payouts about half as high again as a world without climate change, and the OBR puts the additional public debt at roughly a third of GDP by the 2070s. The line that should interest any asset owner/allocator is the Committee's, not mine: that capital holdings ought to reflect the benefit of adaptation that reduces portfolio risk, with the PRA expecting every regulated bank and insurer to be quantifying exactly that by 2030. This is no longer an NGO talking point, rather it is the supervisory direction of travel.

It also pays, which the appraisal evidence has quietly settled while the debate stayed stuck on whether nature counts at all. The Committee's own benefit-cost ratios run from 3:1 to 5:1 for natural flood management and as high as 11:1 for water storage and transfers, with the Leeds scheme that combined engineered defences and catchment measures landing at 11.7:1. The World Resources Institute's triple-dividend work averages better than ten to one once avoided losses and wider economic gains are counted together. None of this is waiting on a carbon price; it is avoided cost, now.

And the carbon route just stayed narrow for one of our strongest assets, in the same few weeks the resilience case for it was being made. The Science Based Targets initiative's new net-zero standard requires companies to neutralise their residual emissions with removals, not with avoidance or reduction credits. Peatland restoration, whose near-term benefit is stopping the oxidation that makes UK peat emit on the order of 16 million tonnes a year, remains avoided emissions. It does draw carbon down again once a bog re-functions, and that tail is real, but it is slow and small against the loss it prevents. So Peatland Code units sit on the avoidance side of the line, below reforestation, which qualifies as a nature-based removal. SBTi has, in effect, confirmed marking peat down as a credit at the precise moment the Climate Change Committee marked it up as infrastructure, the flood attenuation, water supply and wildfire control delivered by the same rewetted ground that acted as a firebreak in the Tywi last summer. If you are financing peat as a carbon credit, you are selling the one part of it the market has just devalued.

One number, closer to home, before the questions. When you pull the paper's per-country figures rather than its global mean, 47.9% of the UK's land area is critical to the local services, and 56.7% once the climate pair is included, against global averages of 30.4% and 44.4%. France sits at 33.6%, Germany at 38.3%. The gap is structural rather than noise: smaller, more densely settled countries tend to need a larger share of their land working to hold the same level of service, because there is less of it and more people downstream of every hectare. Whatever nature is in these islands, it is definitely not just a 2% concern.

Chaplin-Kramer et al.

Which leaves the questions I would put back to anyone quoting the 44%, or the 30 by 30 target it is so often paired with. We protect only about a tenth of UK land today, and in England barely 7% of it is in good ecological condition, so designation is plainly not the same thing as function. So who is the payer for a functioning peatland, or for the catchment above the reservoir that a city drinks from? And are we going to keep pricing these as carbon credits the carbon market cannot properly price (nor acknowledge the permanence benefits), or as the flood and water-supply infrastructure the science now says they are?

The map is finished, and it is pretty a good one, I think. The pricing awaits.

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References

Primary article and its data

Chaplin-Kramer, R., Neugarten, R. A., Sharp, R. P. et al. (2023). Mapping the planet's critical natural assets. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7, 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01934-5

Chaplin-Kramer, R. et al. (2022). Critical natural assets — data and code. Open Science Framework. https://osf.io/r5xz7/

Supplementary Data 1: Percentage of land and waters in critical natural assets for different analyses (supplementary workbook to Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2023). Source of the per-country UK and Ireland figures.

Policy, standards and assessments

Climate Change Committee (2026). A Well-Adapted UK — the Fourth Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk (CCRA4-IA). 20 May 2026. https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/a-well-adapted-uk/

Met Office and expert consortium (Lowe, J., Harrison, M., Perks, R. et al.) (2026). CCRA4-IA Technical Report. UK Climate Risk. https://www.ukclimaterisk.org/

Science Based Targets initiative (2026). Corporate Net-Zero Standard, Version 2.0. Released 11 June 2026. https://sciencebasedtargets.org/corporate-net-zero-standard-v2

IUCN UK Peatland Programme. The Peatland Code. https://www.iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org/peatland-code

Prudential Regulation Authority (2025). Supervisory expectations for banks' and insurers' management of climate-related financial risks (update to SS3/19). Bank of England.

Supporting literature

O'Connor, L. M. J. et al. (2021). Balancing conservation priorities for nature and for people in Europe. Science, 372, 856–860.

Redhead, J. W. et al. (2018). National scale evaluation of the InVEST nutrient retention model in the United Kingdom. Science of the Total Environment, 610–611, 666–677.

Noon, M. L. et al. (2021). Mapping the irrecoverable carbon in Earth's ecosystems. Nature Sustainability, 5, 37–46.

Roe, S. et al. (2019). Contribution of the land sector to a 1.5°C world. Nature Climate Change, 9, 817–828.

Brandon, C. et al. (2025). Strengthening the investment case for climate adaptation: a triple dividend approach. World Resources Institute.

Rising, J. et al. (2026). The macroeconomic case for adaptation investment. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Sayers, P. B. et al. (2025). A national assessment of natural flood management and its contribution to fluvial flood risk reduction. Journal of Flood Risk Management.