What information and whose value must be present at the decision table before capital is committed to an activity affecting land, water, coasts or the ocean?
Many organisations now recognise that they depend on the living world and on one another. Far fewer can point to a decision made differently as a result.
Efforts to measure nature and community too often remain disconnected from the moments that matter: when capital is allocated, when a project is approved, when infrastructure is designed or when public policy is set. Measurement becomes a reporting exercise rather than a mechanism for choosing differently.
The evidence arrives as advice, and advice is easy to set aside. The trade-offs are made anyway, quietly and by default.
The challenge is not simply to generate more data. It is to determine where value resides, whose knowledge counts, how trade-offs are governed and what should happen when a financially attractive activity undermines ecological resilience or community well-being.
Better measurement and more data will not fix that, because the difficulty is not in the evidence. It is in the choice.
Every choice gains something and gives something up. What we can do is examine and assess the trade-offs, in the open, rather than let it happen by default.
This session will examine what is valued, how can this be more visible in decision making and will explore that the real value of any decision comes from a return not just simply in financial terms, but also through benefits for people, society and nature, and it is the balancing of these that creates value for all
