Value of natural capital: the need for chartered surveyors

This insight paper reviews the broad topic of environmental valuation from the perspective of a practising valuer, land manager or estate manager. This paper approaches the field of economic valuation of the environment from a professional valuation perspective.

The language and approaches of environmental valuation are presented to enable parallels to be drawn with the professional and technical procedures that are familiar to professional valuers when dealing with the valuation of conventional property assets in established (actual or notional) market contexts. Naturally, care is required to ensure that clients fully understand the nature of the advice being provided, and that there may — and usually will — be wide divergence between figures provided on these fundamentally different bases.

We encourage all chartered surveyors engaged with land and natural resources in any capacity to familiarise themselves with this paper and other relevant industry publications and stay abreast of developments in the ecosystems services arena as they emerge and evolve.