The Local Environment and Economic Development (LEED) Toolkit was designed to help Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP’s) and local authorities meet their economic growth targets through explicitly considering the economy’s relationship with the environment: to both maximise benefit and minimise risks. The LEED Toolkit offers an easy-to-use, technically robust, systematic and proportionate way of making sense of environmental information in relation to economic planning. Ultimately the toolkit produces accessible, non-technical outputs that assist strategic economic decision making.
The LEED Toolkit has been produced by the Defra network (the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Forestry Commission), working in partnership with several Local Enterprise Partnerships, local authorities and Local Nature Partnerships in England. It has been used by 15 of the 39 Local Enterprise Partnerships so far and who have found that it highlighted important strategic and operational factors which may otherwise have been overlooked, provided strategic evidence-based for economy/environment investment and provided a constructive forum for dialogue with local partners
In the Tees Valley, the LEP has now become part of the Tees Valley Combined Authority. In discussion together the Nature Partnership and Combined Authority agreed it to use the toolkit together. The first part of the toolkit – level 1 is a workshop and was held at the Combined Authority in May 2017. The output of which is below:
- More information about the toolkit can be found at Ecosystems Knowledge Network
- LEED Level 1 Workshop Slides TCVA 24-5-17
- TVNP-YTCP Conference 2017 follow on consultation workshop Natural Capital LEED toolkit
- TVCA LEED Level 1 Report