Rivierenland is a region where everything comes together. Water, soil, agriculture, energy, housing, and nature are all part of one interconnected system. Challenges such as housing development, agricultural transition, energy, water management, and nature restoration are closely intertwined. This interdependence is central to Regio Deal Rivierenland II: future-proof housing, entrepreneurship, and living are directly linked to water and soil quality, spatial planning, and landscape resilience. This calls for a different way of working, based on a shared understanding of the region and the relationships embedded within it.
 

The urgency of making these relationships explicit is also underscored economically. The European Central Bank shows that 72% of euro area companies are critically dependent on ecosystem services, with water representing the largest risk. De Nederlandsche Bank and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency calculated that Dutch financial institutions have financed companies worldwide to the value of EUR 510 billion that are highly or very highly dependent on ecosystem services.
 

The same picture emerged in conversations with stakeholders as part of everyday practice: housing development affects water systems, agricultural choices shape biodiversity and soil quality, and energy infrastructure influences spatial quality and public support. The interdependence is widely recognised, but it remains difficult to manage in decision-making. As a result, tensions keep reappearing: between short and long term, between private and public costs and benefits, and between visible and ‘invisible’ stakeholders.

This exploratory study started from this tension: how can we make the values of the landscape visible and workable enough to guide the choices being made today? Nature-inclusive regional accounting was explored as a possible building block for bringing ecological, social, and economic values together in one coherent framework.

This exploratory study was deliberately not set up as another one-off analysis of the value of nature. Such studies can generate important insights, but they still have limited structural impact on regional decision-making. The central question was therefore not what is the value?, but rather: how can such insights be given a structural place in regional development, decision-making, and financing?

Additional questions included: what should such an accounting framework look like in order to be genuinely useful in practice? What information is needed, in what form, at what moment in the process, and for which users? And what additional institutional, financial, and organisational conditions are needed to make such an instrument function?

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