Projects & Reports
A selection of collaborative projects with the NatCap Insights Team
Insights on equity in urban planning with NASA
Working with collaborators at the Natural Capital Project, our team developed a groundbreaking tool that places environmental justice and equity at the forefront of urban planning. This tool translates complex landscape, climate, and socioeconomic data into actionable metrics, empowering urban planners, policymakers, and community leaders to design more sustainable and livable cities. Through an intuitive web-based platform, users can visualize how green infrastructure—such as parks and natural spaces—impacts ecosystem services and addresses environmental inequities in real-time. By piloting this tool with the city of San Antonio, Texas (USA) we are enabling cities to make informed, equitable investments in green spaces, ultimately reducing pollution, mitigating flood risks, and enhancing quality of life for all residents, particularly those in underserved communities.
Balancing biodiversity with food & energy production
The prospect of integrating farming, conservation, and clean energy could simultaneously reward farmers for producing food and energy, while protecting natural resources. Project SAgES (Solar, Agriculture and Ecosystem Services) is a collaboration with researchers at the University of Minnesota that aims to enable farmers, energy developers, governments, and communities to quantify the environmental benefits of deploying solar technologies in agricultural landscapes and identify opportunities to align the costs and benefits solar could provide to each stakeholder group. We are quantifying solar’s technical potential as well as its potential to improve ecosystem services as a function of where the array is sited. We are finding that the potential to support improved water quality and pollinator conservation using solar largely depends on its location within five miles of a substation. With thoughtful planning, solar energy deployment could be used to support other conservation and environmental goals.
Finding win-win climate adaptation solutions to land degradation in Uzbekistan
In recent years, Uzbekistan has committed to an agenda that aligns its goals for economic growth with global sustainability – emphasizing the need to prioritize sustainable land use, efficient water management, and air pollution reduction, accompanied by low-carbon policies and a shift to renewable energies. We partnered with the World Bank and the Government of Uzbekistan to develop a comprehensive national-scale hotspot map that highlights areas with significant potential for nature-based climate adaptation. We also weighed the costs of ongoing land degradation against the potential costs and benefits of investing in climate-smart technologies. Recognizing the need for systemic change to achieve these goals, we proposed specific policy and practice adjustments to foster the widespread adoption of resilient and climate-smart nature based solutions.