Key insights from envecon 2026, Standardising Environmental Costs for Better Decisions

In this Month's Newsletter:

• What we learned at envecon 2026

  • Key insights from the eftec team

• Standardising Environmental Costs for Better Decisions

  • Allan Provins joins European partners in Berlin to facilitate use of economic value evidence

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What we learned at envecon 2026

Key insights from the eftec team

For all of us at eftec, envecon is the most important conference of the year because it relates so closely to the whole range of work that we do. We’re economic consultants, but our work relies on ecologists, biologists, hydrologists and many others to generate sound evidence that makes meaningful impact. Here is how envecon 2026 impacted our thinking, through our team members sharing their ‘Aha!’ moments:

Ian Dickie, Director: “The biodiversity session reminded me how important it is to clearly define the ‘good’. Biodiversity is too general a term and how we present it matters. If we frame it incoherently, we get incoherent preferences. For example, bird and plant diversity are not alternatives, they should be presented as correlated aspects of biodiversity.”

Ece Ozdemiroglu, CEO: “The keynote speaker, Anjali Goswami, said we need to stop thinking about nature as a reactant – something we simply consume. Rather, nature is a catalyst: a system that enables, supports, and enhances the processes we depend on. So, our way to keep nature in the conversation (theme of the conference) is to show how investing in nature, as a catalyst, will help manage what opinion polls say people care the most about: cost of living, immigration, health. However, Dr Lisa Maria Tanasse (University of Cambridge) warned us that politicians often underestimate how much people care about climate change. Perhaps we should push back when opinion polls and the political narratives that form around them tell us people don’t care about the environment.”

Allegra Naldini, Senior Consultant: “I found some really useful communication tips around linking environmental impacts to broader social issues like the cost of living. It made me think that we could better communicate how, for example, chemical regulation and pollution affect everyday costs and public health.”

Angus Beattie, Consultant: “It was great to hear the debate on valuing biodiversity, and to have work that we did used as an example. It showed that the impact of what we do goes beyond the specifics of a project (e.g. in this case for coastal and marine wildlife) and can actively contribute to cutting edge academic debates.”

Rebecca Lowack, Researcher: “Nature and biodiversity are inherently complex, and we may never fully understand or predict the impacts of their loss. That uncertainty isn’t a reason to stop policy action. It’s a reason to use the tools and evidence we do have to embed nature into decision-making.”

Victoria Reeser, Communications Coordinator and Consultant: “Matt Browne of Wildlife Trusts cited a recent IPPR report about how politicians regularly underestimate constituents’ support for a healthy environment. His presentation highlighted for me how we need to be clear, specific, and positive in our campaigns about nature’s importance and our impacts on it.”

Frayr Bridgeman, Researcher: "Ian Bateman’s call to “Stop single objective decision making” has stayed with me because it captures how environmental challenges can only be addressed through systems thinking (across all policy areas) rather than narrow, siloed goals. It impressed on me the importance of recognising trade‑offs, co‑benefits, and the wider consequences of every policy choice so that decisions genuinely support long‑term environmental wellbeing."

A final takeaway that made all of us smile: There are around 1,000 more Wildlife Trust nature reserves than there are McDonalds in the UK.

Thank you all who attended envecon 2026. We look forward to sharing our multidisciplinary work over the coming year, and to continuing the conversation at next year’s conference.

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Standardising Environmental Costs for

Better Decisions

 Allan Provins joins European partners in Berlin to facilitate use of economic value evidence

Allan Provins, Director at eftec, travelled to Berlin last month for a workshop with the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) to advance the standardization of environmental costs (umweltkosten) and facilitate its use in companies and administrations. The workshop was organised by Intep (Integrale Planung GmbH) and brought together project partners from the European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER) and eftec. 

This workshop is part of a project whose goal is to make environmental costs easier to apply for more well-founded, transparent and impactful policy and investment decisions. In Berlin, the project team discussed which conceptual, scientific and application-oriented criteria could be applied to standardise environmental costs. 

The final outputs from the work will include an analysis of existing valuation methods, definition of criteria for scientific quality and applicability, for easier use of economic value evidence in decision making.