Initiatives
Co Nature

Costing Nature Scientist Level (English) ... Developers: King's College London (models), AmbioTEK (software), UNEP-WCMC (applications)

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Costing Nature Scientist Level (English)

Self paced tutorial https://youtu.be/7_6zw80FLVk

Co Nature

We frequently have to justify the time and resource cost of building and maintaining these systems. If you make use of them please spend 10 seconds to record your support for our efforts here and then click submit. Your responses will help us to make the systems more useful and easier to use and also help us to justify to our sponsors the funding required to maintain and improve the systems.

Access PSS here (scientist user level, free for non-commercial uses. Simply create an account, but make a donation if you can) Access PSS here (superuser, licensed) Access PSS here (hyperuser, licensed) Access PSS here (megauser, licensed)

Developers: King's College London (models), AmbioTEK (software), UNEP-WCMC (applications)

Audience: Conservation and development NGOs, GO and NGO Policy analysts, agriculture and industry (e.g. extractives), education and academic research.

Focus: Co Nature is a web based tool for natural capital accounting and analysing the ecosystem services provided by natural environments (i.e. nature's benefits), identifying the beneficiaries of these services and assessing the impacts of human interventions. This PSS is a testbed for the development and implementation of conservation strategies focused on sustaining and improving ecosystem services. It also focused on enabling the intended and unintended consequences of development actions on ecosystem service provision to be tested in silico before they are tested in vivo . The PSS incorporates detailed spatial datasets at 1-square km and 1 hectare resolution for the entire World, spatial models for biophysical and socioeconomic processes along with scenarios for climate and land use. The PSS calculates a baseline for current ecosystem service provision and allows a series of interventions (policy options) or scenarios of change to be used to understand their impact on ecosystem service delivery. We do not focus on valuing nature (how much someone is willing to pay for it) but rather costing it (understanding the resource e.g. land area and opportunity cost of nature being protected to produce the ecosystem services that we need and value).

Though we provide input data for application of this model anywhere globally (from remote sensing and other global sources) users can also use this model with their own datasets. Application with the provided datasets takes only half an hour and requires no GIS capacity. Bringing in your own datasets will take much longer depending on the availability, level of processing, format and consistency of those datasets and also requires GIS capacity.

Typical applications include ecosystem service assessment, conservation prioritization, analysis of co-benefits e.g. for REDD+ and analysis of pressures and threats on carbon and biodiversity in general or for specific planned agricultural, industrial or extractive interventions.

Training Example applications Need an expert to apply this tool for you

Geographical coverage: global

Spatial resolution: 10 degree tiles @ 1km resolution or 1 degree tiles @ 1-hectare resolution. Globally applicable, locally relevant.

Temporal resolution: Baseline (1950-2000) and scenario

Development status: History: Geodiversity model developed 1999, Costing Nature static global analysis 2007, version 1 2009, version 2 2011 Version 1: complete Version 2: ongoing

Versions: The version 1 model covers water, carbon, hazard mitigation, nature-based tourism, biodiversity and conservation priority as well as current pressures and future threats. It currently does not include land use and climate scenarios, see here Previous version 1 (faster but less sophisticated) Current version 2 Version 3 is in development.

Key users: see here Profiled in: Eco4Biz - Ecosystem services and biodiversity tools to support business decision-making, Nature in the balance, Natural capital business hub, Natural capital coalition, Mongabay, Biology Letters, BSR, Ecosystem services, CCB standards

Documentation:

Model and data documentation can be found here and system (interface and functionality) documentation here.A presentation on the science behind the PSS can be found here (English) and here (Spanish) [opens in Google docs viewer]. Download: (EN, ES). A powerpoint demo of the system functionality is here (English) and here (Spanish) [opens in Google docs viewer]. Download: (EN, ES)

Key references: Mulligan, M. (2015) Trading off agriculture with nature's other benefits, spatially in Zolin, C.A and Rodrigues, R de A.R. (eds) Impact of Climate Change on Water Resources in Agriculture. CRC Press ISBN 9781498706148

Mulligan, M. A. Guerry, K. Arkema, K. Bagstad and F. Villa (2010) Capturing and quantifying the flow of ecosystem services in Silvestri S., Kershaw F., (eds.). Framing the flow: Innovative Approaches to Understand, Protect and Value Ecosystem Services Across Linked Habitats. UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 978-92-807-3065-4. [available here]

Intellectual property: Please do not redistribute or publish on the internet any data or results from these systems in raw GIS form without prior permission from us as we need to ensure that our data provider's licenses are adhered to. If you intend to publish results from this system in the academic literature please send a draft of the paper to us before submission so that we can help ensure that the interpretation is appropriate. If you intend to use this system extensively to deliver the outputs of a funded research or consultancy project, please talk to us before submitting the bid or proposal. To contact us: click here.