Green pays with TEEB City
2012
Discover the benefits
Reasoning, reckoning and earning with the benefits of nature and water
The TEEB City project enabled local authorities to learn through specific projects what benefits ensue from the creation of green spaces and water elements, how those benefits could be quantified and how beneficiaries could be involved as investors.
This taught them that projects in the public space can some- times produce surprising economic benefits. The hope is that this experience will lead to benefits being included as standard in urban planning decision-making processes in the future.
At present, the social benefits of incorporating green amenities and water elements in spatial designs are often considered only retrospectively – or at least, that is the experience of Ursula Kirchholtes from Witteveen+Bos, the engineering firm that is supporting local authorities in this project. She sees this as a missed opportunity. A better option would be to calculate the potential costs and benefits of such projects in advance. It is then possible to see who benefits from the plan, and those beneficiaries can then be included in the process, enabling the plan to be optimised and increasing the enthusiasm of those beneficiaries to participate as co-investors. “The key is first to work out the benefits of the plan, then to do the calculation, and finally to look at where the opportunities for economic benefits lie”.