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TWG 10 – ES in Trade-off analysis & Project evaluation

1. Introduction & Objectives

The capacity of landscapes to concurrently provide multiple ecosystem services is inherently limited and trade-offs occur when one ecosystem service is enhanced at the expense of another. If trade-offs are not acknowledged and identified within a thorough analysis, the effectiveness of any response policy for their management can be potentially impaired. Therefore, impact assessment and trade-off analysis among various types of ecosystem services present a cornerstone of sustainable landscape planning and decision-making. Nevertheless, most land use change decisions are based on incomplete information about the consequences for the involved ecosystems, their services and their effects on human wellbeing. Better tools are therefore needed to capture all the trade-offs involved in land use change and project evaluation, including the economic effects now only partially captured by conventional cost-benefit analysis.

Objective: This working group focuses on the development of tools and guidelines to include information on ES capacity and values in project evaluation and decision making, including among others (expanded) Benefit-Cost Analysis, MCA, MCDA  or more complex Decision Support System-tools such as InVEST, ARIES, BBN, etc.

2. Lead Team & Members

If you are interested in becoming a member of the Lead team, please contact the current lead team members.
If you are interested in becoming a member of this Working group, please click here.

3.Activities and Outputs

This working group focuses on the development and improvement of specific tools for trade-off analysis and project evaluation (see aims). The actual application in practice and the translation into practical guidelines and toolkits is part of the ESP Service “Case studies, Learning sites, Guidelines and Toolkits”.
Specific activities of the working group currently include:
  1. Organizing a sessions at ESP conferences , with the aim to present novel approaches to asses ecosystem service trade-offs,
  2. Preparing a Special Issue in the Ecosystem Services Journal (Elsevier) as an outcome of the session,
  3. Compiling a Database  of available manuals and tools for the assessment of trade-offs  among multiple ecosystem services or impact assessment of projects.  For this we need your input. If you have a tool/manual please fill out the following Draft factsheet and send it to Inge Liekens. An example factsheet can be found here.
  4. Tips and tricks on methods an approaches
    1. The complementarity of models and participative approaches: conclusions of the session at ESP10

Conference outputs:

  • 2019 ESP10 world Conference: Does modelling trade-offs gives the full picture, or can stakeholders tell it all? The complementarity of models and participative methods Book of abstracts, Presentations
  • 2018 Europe ESP Conference: Towards multifunctional landscapes – assessing and governing synergies between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services Book of Abstracts, Presentations
  • 2018 Europe ESP Conference: How to deal with Ecosystem Services trade -offs and conflicts? Book of Abstracts, Presentations
  • 2016 European ESP conference:  Ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies: patterns across case-studies Book of abstracts, Presentations
  • 2015 World ESP 8th conference: Use of ES in trade-off assessment tools and other DSS Book of abstracts, Presentations