The first step is to understand the context your organization or project is working in from the perspective of the key challenges, risks, opportunities and constraints it faces, from both an ecological and an economic perspective. For example, water often presents both ecological and economic challenges in terms of access, usage, quality, and so on.  

Given this context, what does success look like in terms of the ecological and economic outcomes that need to be achieved? There will usually be a range of mandated compliance outcomes, but this is an opportunity to look beyond what must be done to what should be done, and to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. At this stage we don’t need to know how each outcome will be achieved, just that it needs to be achieved. For example, an ecological outcome we may want is that the waterways we impact are swimmable.  We will define what this means more precisely later in the process, and work out how to achieve it, but for now the important thing is that we have put a stake in the ground. Similarly, an economic outcome we may want is to increase crop yield.

Having set the outcomes we want to achieve we now need to understand what drives those outcomes so that we can identify interventions to achieve them in step 6. For example, the “swimmability” of a waterway will be driven by the quality and the quantity of the water in it. The quality of the water will in part be driven by the presence of contaminants, and for an agricultural enterprise, this may be driven by the use of pesticides. Of course, pesticide use also drives economic outcomes like crop yield, so it is likely to be a Key Driver because it drives both Ecological and Economic outcomes. The Eco-Eco Framework^® brings all these relationships together into a logical framework that links Ecological outcomes to Economic outcomes through the Key Drivers.

Now that we understand the key dynamics of the ecological and economic systems through the Eco-Eco Framework^®, we can envision how we want these systems to work in the future.  This is an iterative process which starts with setting targets for the key Ecological and Economic outcomes then working out what the levels for the Key Drivers need to be to hit the outcome targets.  This will make any trade-offs between Ecological and Economic outcomes transparent, as well as where interventions may be needed to change the dynamics of the system.

If the organization or project extends beyond a single location, then it is likely that that some locations will contribute more to the target outcomes or present greater risks and opportunities than others. Identifying critical locations helps to focus interventions on where they will create the most value and to select and shape those interventions for each location. Also, the dynamics at a critical location may vary from the overall model and may warrant recalibration of the Eco-Eco Framework^® for that location.

The selection of interventions required to achieve the future state Ecological and Economic outcomes starts with determining the gaps between the current and future state levels of the Key Drivers.  We then look for systemic or repeatable interventions that can be leveraged across Critical Locations to bridge those gaps. Each intervention is then defined as a project with specific outcomes, activities, timelines and resources.

Now that you are clear about what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it for each Critical Location, it’s time to start working with the other organizations that impact those locations. Of course, collaboration in terms of building relationships and identifying common goals should have started at the outset, and ideally the other parties should have gone through the same preceding steps - which is what our Nature Positive Collaboration Hubs do. However, this is where the rubber hits the road and the intervention projects of all the parties need to be integrated into a single, location-specific program of work. Integration is how results get amplified, and costs are saved. For example, correctly sequencing the delivery of projects from different parties usually gets better results than letting them deliver when they happen to be ready, while volume discounts can be obtained when different parties combine to purchase common inputs.

No plan survives contact with reality, so it’s important to set up monitoring systems and to make course corrections when required. One of the challenges, however, is that changes to ecological outcomes often take a long time and it can be difficult to tell if an intervention is having the desired effect. Also, many other factors can come into play that affect the outcome. The danger is that we either keep changing interventions before they can be effective or that we persist with interventions that aren’t working.

This is where focussing on achieving the target levels for the Key Drivers helps. Through the Eco-Eco Framework® we know how much a particular Key Driver affects a particular Ecological or Economic outcome. We can therefore estimate the impact of an intervention on an outcome based on its impact on the Key Drivers, even when the outcome may take time to emerge, or its measurement is obscured by short term variations or noise.