#8 Nature: The Cheapest Insurance Policy Nobody is Talking About
This month's edition brings a conversation with Will Sandy FLI FRSA on climate, cost vs value and the case for putting landscape at the front of the room. Will is a landscape architect and environmentally focussed designer with his own practice and his work extends from furniture design to urban interventions at every scale.
Our exchange was wide-ranging but at its heart were ecological resistance and resilience. The planet is literally on fire this summer, yet landscape architecture and green infrastructure are still too often either last in the conversation or the first to be cut when project funds tighten. We discussed how the climate reality has started to feel personal rather than abstract: watching wildfires close to family in the south of France and wondering, seriously, what the world will look like for the next generation and beyond.
That sense of urgency ran through everything we discussed.
A Profession Still Watering Its Own Problem
The key point here, as Will put it, is one of value: the value of water, the environment, of the natural ecosystems we depend on, none of which are ever fully considered on a balance sheet. But what if we designed in the economic savings or, even better, the profits created from well considered, environmentally resilient spaces. We both recognise the enormous economic value that landscape can provide, yet it is still treated as a soft add-on or 'nice to have' rather than critical infrastructure.
The gap between past practice and the climate we now have is ever widening, and at pace. For instance, if we adopt a ‘right plant, right place’ approach, surely we must now explore ‘new natives’ - species that are resilient to our changing environmental conditions - and how far does our idea of native need to change? We regularly hear anecdotal stories of the struggle to keep plants alive on projects across the country, with the only answer inevitably being to throw thousands of litres of potable water at the problem.
“We’re a profession still specifying as though the climate hasn’t changed, in a sector that has never quite worked out how to value the thing it desperately needs.”
We were both struck by how often good intentions collide with bad practice. It's a pattern repeating across the country as the gap between what looks good in a render and what survives on site keeps widening.
So Much More Than Pretty Pictures
A recurring frustration we share is around how landscape architecture is perceived. Will described the enduring image of the profession as ‘gardeners’: nice to have, joyful even, but not particularly serious, never mind fundamental to life. The Chelsea Flower Show, he said, has become a kind of catwalk for gardens most people will never be able to afford, reinforcing the idea that landscape is decorative rather than functional. I draw a direct line to my own background in horticulture: a discipline that has been hugely undervalued in the UK for decades in a way it simply isn't in the Netherlands or Germany, where horticultural expertise is highly respected.
However, Will was clear that landscape architects shouldn't overclaim:
“The profession isn’t a single sector riding to the rescue. It’s one part of an immense built environment ecosystem that includes architects, engineers, ecologists and planners, and ultimately answers to accountants, lawyers and investors in rooms landscape professionals rarely access.”
Our goal can’t be to claim sole credit for solving our multiple crises (climate, biodiversity and housing for starters), but if we are to create these green, liveable places everyone claims to want, we must back it up with financial data. We need to prove the commercial value of landscape to ensure we have a seat at the table when key decisions are made.
Speaking the Language of Money
If there was a single thread holding our conversation together, it was this: landscape professionals must get comfortable talking about money, because nobody else will do it for us. We know green space is usually the first thing value engineered out of a scheme, because it's often seen simply as a debit on the balance sheet. Everyone says they want it, until they see the price tag. Sadly, due to our focus on the capital expenditure of a project, there’s also rarely a whole-life cost case put together to demonstrate the enormous benefits that landscape can deliver over time.
“You can’t charge rent for a patch of green space in the way you can charge for an extra bedroom or bathroom.”
The examples we discussed were striking. Kevin Barton FLI of Robert Bray Associates had described to Will a scheme where making the case for landscape early enough avoided close to a million pounds of mechanical water management infrastructure, for a design fee a fraction of that amount. Research demonstrates time and again that any decision to remove a park or green space is entirely short-sighted and will likely cost more money than is saved. In health alone, parks and green spaces save the NHS at least £111m per year through prevented GP visits; enough to fund more than 3,500 nurses. We both know the profession is sitting on more evidence like this than it currently uses.
Insurance, we suspect, might be the argument that finally lands with people who have tuned out the environmental case. This line of thought reflects the exact conversation I had with Callum Ellis just a few months ago. When a property becomes more expensive (or impossible) to insure because it sits on a canalised river corridor, or a development is delayed because flood risk hasn't been fully designed out, that captures attention in a way that a general appeal for nature does not.
“If a resident can be shown that a specific piece of planting or drainage design saves them a few hundred pounds a year on their insurance premium or domestic bills, that’s a conversation that will focus attention at the pub, on the weekly shop and other things people spend their money on, not an abstract environmental pitch.”
Our conclusion is that perhaps every proposal for a landscape project should open with the financial case, not the pretty pictures. I recalled a Landscape Institute client guide on exactly this subject, published back in 2015. The tools for us to make a sound economic argument have existed for years; what's missing is the discipline to use them, and the case studies to back them up, on every single project.
There is an important caveat that we recognised: this argument only lands with clients who retain an asset long enough to appreciate these benefits. Developers building purely for a pension fund or a quick sale have little incentive to care about running costs they'll never pay. Hence the whole-life cost case is most relevant to owner-occupiers (build-to-rent operators, universities and local authorities for example) and those that live with a scheme for 25 years rather than two or three. So, knowing which audience is in the room is as important as having the numbers prepared…
Building Trust, Building Belonging
Our conversation moved beyond cost to something harder to quantify: trust. Will has been closely involved in Hastings' Town Centre Green Connections project. He described a town where road infrastructure sits with one authority and the town centre with another and where a genuinely ambitious green public realm scheme has been steadily diluted over five years into something closer to a well planted highways improvement project. When people are promised transformation and repeatedly get a watered-down version instead, they stop believing the next promise, which makes future engagement even harder.
I recognised the pattern from my own recent experience with a Business Improvement District, where ambitious plans for a greener, more pedestrian-friendly high street have stalled for years over funding, having already been through several iterations. How many times, throughout the entirety of the UK, is this happening? We both see this as a wider trust problem, not just a delivery one: repeated cycles of consultation and workshops that lead nowhere erode public confidence in the entire process, regardless of how good the next scheme might be.
Will's argument was that well-designed public and green space can do real work here, as one of the few remaining 'third places' where people from different backgrounds still have chance encounters. When asked for their favourite thing or biggest source of pride about where they live, Britons overwhelmingly mention green space, parks and nature. Parks, high streets and the public realm may be the last shared spaces left where someone can have a reasonable conversation with a stranger who holds different beliefs. This is at a moment when many other opportunities to do so, from the local pub to civic meetings, have become less accessible due to cost or more polarised due to politics. Genuine engagement means reaching out to communities and building trust through visible, local involvement, including training and jobs, rather than assuming good intentions will be enough. This reflects another recent conversation I had with Stephanie Kerr...
Parks, pride and place , a recent report from More in Common UK clearly demonstrated the role green spaces can play in building pride in place and support at the ballot box. Surely, with the latest change of leadership, this is the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate the way we value green space policy and build it into the UK budget?
Sowing the Seeds to Match the Ambition
Our final thoughts were around capability and whether our sector has the skills to deliver what it's asking for? We’re both all too aware of a wider need to raise the status of the specialist knowledge underpinning all of this. Horticultural expertise remains one of the most undervalued disciplines in the sector, despite the very specific skills it takes to select and care for planting that will cope with UK conditions as they shift ever more rapidly.
Will described ongoing work in Hastings to link green infrastructure with training and job creation, exploring models where small landscape maintenance social enterprises could train local people while generating their own revenue. Many opportunities exist to run contracts with care homes, community organisations and local authorities alike.
He also raised work he's doing in Lebanon on post-conflict landscape recovery, researching how a ‘Superbloom’ might bring multiple benefits. A symbol of hope and a powerful, natural form of ecological and psychological reclamation, this sudden and unexpected spectacle acts as a metaphor for resilience and renewal. The concept goes beyond beauty and is inspired by the Flanders poppy (Papaver rhoeas) - a hardy pioneer species that thrives on heavily disturbed soil - where dormant, native landscapes reassert themselves over developed, disturbed, or arid land.
Plant species would be selected for their microbial bioremediation of contaminated soils, transforming war torn landscapes into vibrant carpets of colour, while actively cleaning contaminated agricultural land. That combination, he argued, of hard technical function and emotional impact, is exactly the case the profession should be making more often, and more visibly.
We Have the Knowledge. Do We Have the Nerve?
Neither of us claim to have any easy answers to what we see as a very real crisis in our collective profession. What came through instead was a shared sense of urgency, and a frustration that the sector already has much of what it needs in terms of evidence: the case studies, the technical knowledge, even scattered examples of good practice in situ. But these are so rarely joined up or put under the noses of those who make the final decisions and hold the finances.
Our instinct is that leading with a financial case, backed by genuine evidence and delivered by properly valued, uniquely skilled people, isn't a betrayal of what landscape architecture stands for. It might be the only way left to get it taken seriously.