Making the Parrett Catchment more sustainable calls for wider consideration of all the land use functions, goods and services that the catchment's natural resources can provide. The key drivers of ecosystem change in England often lie beyond the remit of those charged with the conservation and management of our natural resources.

To enable more effective decision-making, ecosystem assessments have to move beyond simply assembling biophysical data describing how systems are changing. It will be essential for tools developed by this project to be as robust and easy to use as possible by all organisations, interest groups and possibly even communities in the catchment. The study will try to ensure this by developing an inclusive approach for creating a socially negotiated framework in which the values of ecosystem goods and services are better understood, and the limits to necessary or desired levels of their supply are adequately identified.

Although unique in many ways the sustainability issues and opportunities found in the Parrett catchment are sufficiently generic in character for the study to be useful in testing and developing guidelines for best practice that could be applied elsewhere. Our findings will be communicated as widely as possible to spread the learning from this case study.