Economic Impact Assessment of Research Information

Client: UKCEH
Year: 2025
eftec Team: Ece Ozdemiroglu, Duncan Royle, Victoria Reeser
Service area(s): Evaluation
Location: UK

Image of an yellow legged hornet perched on a flower

Research providers often share these challenges regardless of their area of research:

What is the impact of our research?
What is the value of that impact?

The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), which operates many research programmes, worked with eftec to answer these questions and some more that is specific to provision of data, including:

How do we make a business case for maintaining research and data collection?
What is the added value of our collation, QA and accessibility work?
How do we test the assumption that better information leads to better decisions?

As the majority of their funding comes from public sources, the information they provide is free-to-access.

Estimating the economic value of something that doesn’t have a price is what we do best. In this project, we supported UKCEH by valuing two of their programmes: the National River Flow Archive and the Great British Non-native Species Portal (GBNNSIP). Assessment of three further research programmes undertaken by UKCEH is ongoing. This work is informing UKCEH’s impact reporting and NERC’s metrics for evaluating the impact of the programmes they sponsor. This summary showcases GBNNSIP.

The GBNNSP provides access to distribution maps and other information for all known non-native invasive species (NNIS) in Great Britain. It sits in a larger programme of NNIS data collection and research networks. Within this programme, the GBNNSIP is both a tool to log data and an output of the data process. UKCEH provided us with a summary of these data pathways, which was an important first step in beginning to map the portal’s routes to impact.

Firstly, data is collected by research institutions, statutory bodies, and volunteers (citizen scientists). This information is logged in the GBNNSIP and other programmes. The data is then verified by UKCEH staff who work on the larger programme of NNIS data collection. Finally, the refined data is shared through the GBNNSIP and to many other outputs, such as Horizon scanning, distribution maps, trends and traits, global databases, ad hoc research requests, and others. Users of this information are then able to feed back into the data collection process, such as by better approaches to species identification or research on distribution trends, for example.

As the programme is composed of a large network of actors who input information, share within research organisations and outward, or act to remove or prevent NNIS, we first created a value chain for the information or the routes to impact that could be attributed to the GBNNSP. The programme has many benefits such as informing research and citizen science, avoiding economic loss via prevention or eradication (e.g., lowering invasive bird count that could damage to crops), and forecasting future invasions.

Working with key stakeholders, we were able to attribute the prevention of NNIS for species on the Alert Species List to the GBNNSP as it is the primary body to inform the list and alert the relevant public bodies who are responsible for acting when an invasion is affirmed by the portal.

The second step was to define the counterfactual. In this case, the counterfactual was what would happen in the absence of GBNNSP: more species on the Alert List would become established in Great Britain and management costs to ‘fight back’ against these species would increase. Therefore, the primary benefit of the GBNNSIP is the prevention of new establishments and the avoidance of associated management costs.

There are 19 priority species on the Alert List, for which UKCEH is the main actor for confirming sightings and sharing with the appropriate public bodies. We sourced cost data for these species, considering the value, availability, and confidence of this data. Ultimately, we used avoided management costs from prevention of the yellow legged hornet (Asian hornet, Vespa velutina) establishing in the UK as a minimum indicator of the portal’s value as the costs would be high (£225 million over 60-years). The potential management costs from establishment of the yellow legged hornet were the most robust and had the most significant costs compared to other species, and had greater confidence than potential damage costs.

Illustration of current management costs to counterfactual costs (not to scale). Costs are 60-year present values in 2024 terms.

Other benefits included in the assessment were:

Use of information in research: 6-10,000 views per year on the portal, 20 peer-reviewed papers using data from the portal, and its use as a template for the design of the UK Overseas Territory INNS processes.
Participation benefits: £25-40k per year in volunteering time of citizen scientists based on 2,100- 3,300 hours annually.