Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made, if any, of the total monetary value of the benefits delivered by urban wetlands.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Rt Hon. the Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

House of Lords

London

SW1A 0PW

26 May 2023

Dear Lady Jones,

As National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what assessment has been made, if any, of the total monetary value of the benefits delivered by urban wetlands (HL8042).

The UK Natural Capital Accounts produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) provide monetary estimates for the goods and services provided by a range of eight broadly defined habitats.

“Wetlands” is not among these, but can be found in several other habitats such as “Freshwater” and “Mountains Moorlands and Heath”.

“Urban” is one of these eight habitats, and captures a range of other ecosystems in and around dense population areas. We will be updating our approach in our upcoming Urban habitat account release this summer. In this, we plan to include data on the total area of sub-habitats that can be found within “urban” areas, including estimates of the total area of “urban-wetlands”. We would be very happy to discuss these results with you once they are available.

While the natural capital accounts are primarily national, in our 2022 Natural Capital Accounts Roadmap [1] we committed to increasing their spatial granularity. This will help us to more readily address questions requiring lower geographical levels.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/articles/naturalcapitalaccountsroadmap/2022