'Accounting for the values of nature in laws, policies and planning for sustainable development

The proposed activities focus on synthesising cross-disciplinary evidence concerning the inter-relationships between the environment and economies, and options for taking these into account in laws, policy and planning in low and middle income countries. 

This focus necessarily entails a cross-disciplinary approach – many organisations including the United Nations Statistical Division; UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and Research Councils UK have recognised that Targets 15.9 and 17.9 of the Sustainable Development Agenda simply cannot be achieved without close collaboration across a broad range of professional and research disciplines. In this context there is a particularly pressing need for objective-driven collaboration between producers of environmental knowledge and data (e.g. ecologists, biodiversity scientists and other environmental scientists, geographers); producers of economic knowledge and data (e.g. economists and accountants); and various end-users of knowledge and data concerning the economy and natural environment (e.g. policy specialists and policymakers, lawyers, regulators, and spatial and development planners).