Valuing Victoria Business Improvement District's Urban Forest - a comparison of methodologies

There are more than 200 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) operating across the United Kingdom. A BID is a business‐led and business funded body formed to improve a defined commercial area. Several BIDs in the UK have either already developed their green infrastructure plans or are currently looking at similar audits. The Victoria BID in London, was the first to carry out an audit and this has led to significant interest and investment in environmental improvements in the area. More recently 14 other London BIDs have completed their audits. The two Liverpool BIDs and Northwich BID in Cheshire, have also carried out their audit and are due to publish their Green Infrastructure Prospectus in summer 2016. Victoria BID’s Green Audit identified the importance of the urban forest. The population of mature trees, mainly London Plane (Platanus × acerifolia) providing a wide range of benefits for the BID area. Itree was used to assess the economic value of the urban forest. However, for the non‐tree green infrastructure elements the GI‐Val toolkit was used. As part of the EU Cost Action IP1204 "GreenInUrbs", further work has been carried out to look at the use of itree and GI‐Val. The results showed that the itree provided more detailed data that could not only be used to establish the economic value of the urban forest, and inform detailed management planning. However, data capture was expensive and time consuming. GI‐Val in contrast provided less detailed data on the green infrastructure resource, provided a wider range of tools and values, and took significantly less resource to gather and analyze data. GI‐Val also was able to provide data on a wider range of green infrastructure typologies than itree. However, the results provided less accurate data on the economic value of the green infrastructure.