Which tools can I use to support capacity building on NBS?

Overview

Capacity building is what turns a method into something an organisation can do for itself. The material collected here was developed and tested with the project's own partners, demonstration areas and summer course participants, and it is aimed at the point where a professional needs to be able to apply an approach rather than to know that it exists.

What is available

The Massive Open Online Course is the broadest instrument. It takes the whole chain — the insurance value of ecosystems, the assessment methods, the participatory processes and the construction of a business model — and works through it in the sequence a real case follows, using the demonstration areas as the working contexts. It is delivered online with a field week, and it has been run as part of university curricula, as an open course and as the backbone of tailored training on a participant's own case.

For specific tools there is dedicated training. The Eco:Actuary Policy Support System training accompanies the guidelines and is kept current as the toolkit develops, covering each module and the three UK applications documented in the guidelines. The FreeStation training is self-paced and takes a participant from building a low-cost monitoring station through the firmware and server software to the natural flood management analysis functions, so that a catchment group or a landowner can demonstrate what their interventions are achieving without commissioning a monitoring contract.

The street-level guidelines on the insurance value of ecosystems provide a short introduction that can be inserted directly into a capacity building activity, and the NAS canvas guidance provides the business model component. Taken together they cover the concept, the assessment, the monitoring and the financing.

How to use it

The material is modular and can be entered at any point. An organisation introducing Nature Based Solutions into its work usually begins with the course; one that already has a method and needs to apply it begins with the tool-specific training. All of it is available online, and the tool-specific material is updated as the tools change rather than issued once.