Kingdom of the Netherlands | All biomes and ecosystem services, creating esvd.net, stakeholder analysis | Status: Finished, April 2021
LNV 2021: Updating and upgrading the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database
The project, carried out in 5 months had two key tasks: Updating and expanding the ESVD with value records that are relevant for the Netherlands and developing a new online interface. While preparing for the 2 major tasks, we carried out a thorough stakeholder inventory.
We noticed that all frontrunners are mainly focused on making a biodiversity positive impact, although all stakeholders seem to agree that we need to substantially lower the amount of “brown” investments. To reduce the negative ecological impact it is essential to have better information on the ecological impact of the whole supply chain. To do this in a correct manner all stakeholders agree that there is an urgent need for more location based data. Methodologies that are currently used to assess ecological impact are lacking this component and are therefore easily misused or correct in theory but not improving biodiversity.
Updating the ESVD, resulted in raising the total of ‘Dutch related values’ in ESVD to 796, i.e. almost 4x as many as were available before the LNV project. This is more than we originally anticipated to be able to achieve considering the short time available. The 796 Dutch-related values come from 87 studies, with an average of almost 10 data points per study. Most value records were found for water-related biomes such as coastal systems, rivers-and lakes and coral reefs. A relatively small number of value estimates came from terrestrial ecosystems, for example cultivated or forested areas. The majority of value estimates came from cultural and provisioning ecosystem services while 194 records (24%) came from a mix of services. For the Netherlands, we found that data from protected areas are over-represented within the ESVD as compared to other parts of the world.
The second main task was the development of a new interface (www.esvd.net). Co-capacity developed and implemented basically functionalities regarding data submission, data queries and download options, and data visualization by means of automatized summary tables including the underlying statistics. The website is now fully functional but continuous refinement and development of additional functionalities is essential in the coming years.
Involved user groups and ESVD applications
In this project we aimed to show the benefits of using the ecosystem services approach to take the 'full' value of Dutch-related ecosystems into account (also including the Dutch Caribbean). We are specifically targeting the following user groups through the following ESVD applications:
Governments
The usefulness of spatial ecosystem services values was recognized by LNV. The ESVD update can assist LNV in their decision-making process by highlighting the importance of nature, focusing on the use for financial institutions. This will happen by a data update and improved functionalities.
IMPACT ASSESSMENTS
The ESVD can help to address the impact of supply chains on biodiversity and ecosystem services, recognizing the need for location-based data.