LENs approach referenced in 25 year environment strategy

In January 2018 the UK Government published their long term environmental ambitions to set the tone for future policies and priority areas of focus in A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve our Environment.

3Keel’s work deploying our Landscape Enterprise Network (LENs) framework programme, working in partnership with Nestlé and Business in the Community (BITC), featured as an example of best practice. The plan says it will consider the results of a pilot we are running with Natural England’s in the Hampshire Avon catchment and assess how to encourage better uptake of this approach to engaging the private sector.

The work builds on a project delivered in East Anglia (download pdf) and Cumbria (download pdf) identifying the business case for a broad range of sectors to invest in regional natural capital.

LENs provides a framework for business collaboration, by identifying shared interests in landscape assets and developing enterprise- based solutions for improving the health of those assets (see figure, below). The first step is to identify a small group of businesses with overlapping interests in a landscape. By understanding in detail the landscape functions that each of those businesses have a commercial interest in, as well as the landscape assets that underpin those functions, we can start to see how and where their interests overlap. Once we know what and where the shared assets are, we can work on identifying the sorts of investments, market opportunities, or agreements that could secure and enhance those assets. The process also identifies enterprise(s) in the landscape that could deliver the right outcomes.

For more information on LENs can be found in the landscape innovation section of our website.