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Across the globe, society faces significant environmental challenges. Deforestation, intensive agriculture, pollution, and overexploitation of natural resources among other pressures create the conditions for natural capital depletion, ultimately jeopardizing economic development. To reverse such trends in the water sector and avoid the collapse of inland water ecosystems, the European Commission introduced the Water Framework Directive. A distinct example of integrated water resources management, the Directive aims to provide a holistic approach of managing inland waters efficiently by substituting previous fragmented legislation that focused on managing different aspects of water resources. Still, despite progress in the Directive's implementation, approximately half of the EU's surface waters are not in good condition. Analysing the efforts of Member States to assess the socio-economic dimensions of water ecosystems and develop programmes of measures to achieve the objectives of the Directive, indicates a lack of understanding of what and how should be assessed. The information included in the River Basin Management Plans denotes insufficient connections between pressures and interventions, as well as poor economic analysis that often disregards a great portion of benefits and costs associated with transitioning towards a desired state. To support the implementation of the Directive and to provide a systems thinking perspective on environmental management decisions, the presented work blends ecosystem services with economic methodologies, develops integrated tools and approaches and tests their applicability in real cases. Findings show that such tools improve the robustness of the socioeconomic assessments of proposed measures and have the potential to engage stakeholders in the process. Additionally, they enable the use of natural capital accounting methodologies to improve the understanding of the connection between management interventions and the overall system status. Furthermore, the included research assesses the effectiveness of nature-based approaches as interventions on the system to influence the interactions of components within socioecological systems and drive them towards the desired state. Additionally, given the way economic dimensions permeate decision-making processes and current debates on environmental management, the current thesis proposes an alternative vision for the sustainable use of natural resources. Overall, the undertaken research demonstrates the need for using economic tools through a systems prism for the implementation of the Water Framework Directive and environmental policies in general to deliver socioecological improvements.

The concept of a Circular Economy has gained policy traction as a mainstream solution for preserving and renewing. This work sought to understand which policy instruments have been successful, might still be necessary, and are most likely in the future to deliver a high penetration Circular Economy for materials, wastes and associated energy. Waste related policy decisions in England over the past 20 years were reviewed, exploring the regulatory means that had achieved the current 44% diversion of municipal wastes from landfill. The hypothesis is that to achieve a far-reaching Circular Economy, at a greater scale, across different sectors and for a wider product range, suitable physical infrastructure (waste treatment assets) must be available to circulate those materials in the economy. Furthermore, the study set out to value financially and in terms of social and economic benefits that could be derived from a circular approach across the whole economy. We found the financial value to be significant at circa 1.5% of English GDP or  32bn and 72,000-175,000 jobs. It was demonstrated by calculation that DEFRA analysis (for England) underestimated the capacity gap for infrastructure by 11.3 million tonnes per annum in 2014. The policy findings were that the early implementation of blunt instruments such as a landfill tax and separate collection of recyclables did allow for diversion performance of approximately 45-50% recycling and composting, the remaining 50% of which was progressively treated by energy from waste rather than landfill. It is apparent that policies that drive system changes are effective in bringing about ecological transformations of how societies, economies, and governments operate at all levels. This ecological transformation is undoubtedly difficult to achieve since it will require consumers, manufacturers, regulators, policymakers, media, and business all to move differently and together, but nevertheless it is critical at a global scale.