Global | Agriculture, coastal and wetland ecosystems, geospatial ecosystem service valuation mapping, impact assessment, value transfer, update ESVD | Status: Started April 2022
FAO-ABC project 2022: Contributing to a geospatial tool
The objective of this project is to provide input and contribute to a new geospatial app, the Adaptation, Biodiversity and Carbon Mapping Tool (ABC-Map) that allows governments, international funds, agricultural banks, and other stakeholders to holistically assess the environmental impact of National Policies and Plans (NDCs, NAPs, etc.) and investments in the AFOLU sector.
For the natural capital assessment of the biodiversity section, ABC-Map already uses a wide range of ecosystem service values from ESVD. The objectives for this project are fourfold:
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Development of a new ecosystem classification to be used in the ABC-Map.
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Estimations for monetary valuation of additional non-agricultural (grassland, coastal wetlands, inland wetlands, open sea/ocean) and agricultural ecosystem services are updated based on the ESVD methodology and following the TEEB, CICES and SEEA-EEA ecosystem service classification structure.
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The summary values for agricultural systems, currently aggregated at biome level, are disaggregated into finer ecosystem levels.
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Value functions on ESVD values are piloted, using various geo-socio-economic parameters (including e.g. population density, GDP, climatic conditions, etc.) to adapt ecosystem service values to different local contexts and hence address the global representation of the database.
Involved user groups and ESVD applications
In this project we aim to show the benefits of using the ecosystem services approach to take the 'full' value of grasslands, agriculture and (inland) wetlands into account. We are specifically targeting the following user groups through the following ESVD applications:
International Governmental Organisations
The ESVD works together with the FAO on a tool to spatially do natural capital assessments for investments, modeling potential impacts of land cover change based on satellite data.
IMPACT ASSESSMENTS
With the ESVD, we are assessing the impact of land cover changes through the monetary valuation of land cover changes. This informs on the changes in welfare as a result of the changes in land cover. This is useful information to be used by the government for sustainably managing the land.
Financial Institutions
The ESVD works together with the FAO on a tool to do natural capital assessments for investments, modeling potential impacts of land cover change based on satellite data.