New Checklists Aim to Boost Real-World Uptake of Ecosystem Service Assessments in Europe

Ecosystem service assessments have become a cornerstone of European environmental policy, underpinning everything from the EU Biodiversity Strategy to the proposed Nature Restoration Law. Yet a persistent and troubling gap has emerged: while the number of assessments mapping and valuing nature’s benefits keeps growing, there is remarkably little evidence that decision-makers actually use the results. A new study published in One Ecosystem tackles this paradox head-on, offering practitioners a set of practical checklists designed to make ecosystem service assessments more robust, more relevant and, ultimately, more likely to be taken up by the people who commission and use them.

The research, led by scientists connected to the EU-funded SELINA project, draws on an extensive review of 111 guidance documents written in twelve European languages, ranging from English and German to Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian and Swedish. Unlike previous reviews, which focused on peer-reviewed scientific literature, this study deliberately mined the so-called grey literature: project reports, official policy documents, instruction manuals and other practical guidance produced across Europe since 2018. The authors argue that this body of material captures the real-world state of the art in how ecosystem service assessments are actually designed and executed, rather than how they are idealised in academic journals.

The motivation for the work stems in part from two reviews conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment. Those reviews independently found a striking lack of documentation of uptake in ecosystem service assessment publications across all method types, whether biophysical, economic or socio-cultural. A decade earlier, a review of economic valuations found that only about two percent documented any uptake at all. The new study’s authors note that, despite growing political interest in nature valuation, little has improved in the intervening years when it comes to evidence that assessments actually influence decisions.

This disconnect is particularly striking given recent policy momentum in Europe. The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 calls for an EU-wide methodology to map, assess and restore ecosystems so they can continue delivering benefits to society. The proposed Nature Restoration Law would require Member States to restore twenty percent of the EU’s land and sea by 2030, with specific targets tied to ecosystem condition variables and ecosystem service indicators such as organic carbon stocks. Meanwhile, ecosystem accounting is being standardised internationally and implemented across the EU, with national statistical offices working to integrate ecosystem extent, condition and biophysical service accounts into official environmental economic accounts.

To bridge the gap between knowledge supply and policy demand, the research team organised their review around seven diagnostic topics, each chosen for its potential to strengthen the robustness and relevance of assessments. Four topics target the biophysical core of assessment practice: spatial resolution and scaling capability; the integration of ecosystem condition; the distinction between ecosystem service capacity, potential, supply, use and demand; and the documentation of uncertainty. Three further topics address plural valuation, examining how well biophysical assessments can be combined with economic valuation, with assessments of social benefits and justice, and with human health benefit assessment.

Each diagnostic topic was evaluated independently by groups of five to seven co-authors with diverse assessment experience and language skills, using structured surveys to extract how each guidance document defined and addressed the topic and where in the policy cycle the guidance was intended to apply. The teams then distilled their findings into checklist questions for practitioners and commissioners of assessments. The resulting checklists, published as supplementary materials, are organised around the five-step plural valuation framework recommended by the IPBES Values Assessment: investing in a legitimate process, defining the purpose with stakeholders, establishing the scope considering plural values, choosing and applying methods, and communicating results for decisions.

The review revealed clear patterns in where existing guidance is strong and where it falls short. Coverage of the policy cycle is best for agenda setting, policy formulation and implementation, but weakest for policy adoption and retrospective policy evaluation. In other words, guidance literature offers relatively little support for choosing between competing policy options or for evaluating the outcomes of decisions already taken. The authors also found that guidance on biophysical methods, such as ecosystem condition and service capacity, rarely addresses stakeholder engagement or legitimacy, whereas guidance on economic, social and health benefits consistently recommends involving stakeholders in the assessment process.

Perhaps most revealing is what the checklists do not cover. The review teams supplemented the guidance-derived questions with additional ones addressing gaps they identified from their own practitioner experience, with a particularly large expansion of questions on social and health benefits, legitimate involvement of local communities, and the practical challenges of spatial scaling and of distinguishing capacity from demand. Notably, no additional questions were added to the uncertainty checklists, because that topic was the subject of a separate dedicated review still under way at the time of writing.

The authors are candid about the limits of their approach. Checklists, they stress, operate on the supply side of knowledge: they can help practitioners design better studies, but they cannot guarantee that political actors will use the results. Drawing on a political valuation typology, they describe how assessments can be affirmatively used to counterbalance injustices, confirmatively used to justify decisions already taken, or even appropriated, repressed or discriminated by powerful actors pursuing private interests. In such settings, sponsors may actively resist the documentation of uncertainty precisely because it could cast foregone conclusions into doubt. Recognising these political dynamics, the authors argue, is essential for understanding why technically sound assessments sometimes fail to influence policy.

The checklists are intended as flexible menus rather than rigid protocols: given the vast variation in assessment contexts, not every question will be relevant to every application. The next step is empirical validation. Within the SELINA project, the checklists will be tested in demonstration projects across partner countries, where researchers and stakeholders will assess whether the questions genuinely identify design features that increase uptake. The longer-term ambition is to refine them into templates for terms of reference that can be used to commission and design future ecosystem service assessments. If successful, the approach could help close a decade-old gap between the growing science of valuing nature and the decisions that depend on it.

Subject of Research: Best-practice checklists for increasing the uptake of ecosystem service assessments in European policy

Article Title: Increasing uptake of ecosystem service assessments: best practice check-lists for practitioners in Europe

Article References: Barton, D. N., Immerzeel, B., Brander, L., Grêt-Regamey, A., Kato Huerta, J., Kretsch, C., Le Clech, S., Rendón, P., Seguin, J., Arámbula Coyote, M., Babí Almenar, J., Balzan, M., Burkhard, B., Carvalho-Santos, C., Geneletti, D., Guisado Goñi, V., Giannakis, E., Liekens, I., Lupa, P., … Villosalda, M. (2024). Increasing uptake of ecosystem service assessments: best practice check-lists for practitioners in Europe. One Ecosystem, 9, Article e120449. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.9.e120449

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.9.e120449

Keywords: ecosystem services, ecosystem assessment, IPBES, policy uptake, MAES, Nature Restoration Law, ecosystem accounting, uncertainty, plural valuation, SELINA project, guidance documents, EU Biodiversity Strategy