What is the job of a river?

Over the last few years, a new way of looking at big plans, policy shifts and projects is to analyse them from the perspective of ecosystem services.

We all rely on ecosystem services, whether we like it or not - and whether we know it or not. We all eat food. We all drink water. We all breathe air. Mostly, in a country like the UK, we just don’t realise that these are ecosystem services – to most of us, carrots come from the supermarket, not an ecosystem.

In the recent edition of 'the environmentalist', I worked with Dr Mark Everard to look at how stakeholders are being engaged in the practice of making an ecosystem services assessment. I blog about it here.