Wye/Usk
The Wye-Usk regional test draws from the ongoing work of North Star Transition in these two river catchments. The team’s Wye-Usk Transition Lab has brought system participants together from across the catchments to explore how to transform the landscape into a healthy place for people and nature to thrive.
This work seeks to test the hypothesis that by developing collective systemic understanding – grounded in the Wye and Usk region – we can tackle barriers and enable resources to be applied to shifting operating practices to more profitable and resilient models, within which Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are mainstreamed.
A key question of the Wye-Usk test is what would enable NbS solutions to be financed at scale and what governance would be needed to allow this finance to be unlocked?
The test will seek to:
- Understand why NbS actions are not being implemented, including hurdles to be overcome in behaviour, policy, resources, standardisation, collaboration, and economic proposition (cash flows, buyers, investors).
- Co-create a proof of concept for what changes would enable the environmental and social outcomes that need to emerge and how these could be funded. This could include assessing reliability of outcomes, balance of impacts versus benefits to implementers, and the role of water companies alongside other sectors.
