How can you value green spaces?

The City of the London Corporation has commissioned a report to show just what is the financial value of the benefits provided by the open spaces, parks and gardens that it operates in London and the South East. The City Corporation protects over 11,000 acres of parks, forests, heaths, gardens and historic open spaces.

It spends £38 million a year on maintaining these open spaces. Many of these sites operate as charitable trusts and are run at little or no cost to the communities they serve. Additionally they include a wide variety of critically important wildlife habitats, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Special Areas of Conservation, and National Nature Reserves, and are protected under legislation.

The report, produced by Natural Capital Solutions, calculated the value of the benefits that these open spaces deliver to the public, including through recreation, health and wellbeing, air and water quality, and by removing carbon from the atmosphere.

It found that the overall benefit-to-cost ratio is 16.4 – meaning that every £1 spent on maintaining and protecting these open spaces delivers £16.40 in ‘natural capital benefits’ for the public.  The bottom line is  that this is worth £282.6 million each year in benefits to society, and £8.1 billion over 50 years.

Over 60% of the City Corporation’s sites comprises Epping Forest – Essex and London’s biggest green space, and Hampstead Heath – the capital’s largest ancient parkland. Together, they attract around 18.1 million visitors a year. Hampstead Heath was found to provide recreation and health benefits worth £48.3 million a year, and the ability of Epping Forest to remove carbon from the atmosphere to be worth £4.5 million annually.

The report found they are also two of the City Corporation’s highest-performing sites when it comes to delivering natural benefits to the public, including through capturing carbon from the atmosphere, air purification, and recreation and health, with a combined value of £115.6m every year – with both providing important access to nature for a wide range of communities in densely urban areas.

The City Corporation’s sites, which also include Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire and West Ham Park in Newham, are home to 58,000 ancient trees and capture over 16,000 tonnes of carbon every year.

In total, they attract over 47 million visitors annually – over three times the number who go to Premier League football matches every season, and almost eight times the number of annual visitors to the Grand Canyon. They host education courses reaching tens of thousands of school children every year.

These open spaces won five honours in 2023’s London in Bloom competition, with a further 15 taking Green Flag awards, recognising them as some of the best managed green spaces in the world.

They are an important part of the City Corporation’s Climate Action Strategy which commits the organisation to achieving net zero carbon emissions in its own operations by 2027, and to supporting the achievement of net zero for the whole Square Mile by 2040.