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

The numbers behind the study’s setting are stark. Colombia extracted roughly 69.3 million tons of coal in 2023, declining to 59.3 million tons in 2024, and La Jagua de Ibirico sits at the heart of that story. The municipality’s population surged by 138 percent between 2005 and 2020 as open-pit operations expanded, even as production in the municipality itself fell from 15.9 million tons in 2012 to 10.9 million tons in 2020. The paradox the researchers set out to examine is precisely this: how can a region plan an energy transition while its economy, institutions, and identities remain welded to the export of a fuel the world is supposed to abandon?

The team’s environmental forensics are unambiguous. Using official forest and hydrographic data from Colombia’s IDEAM and IGAC institutes, delineated against high-resolution Planet satellite imagery in a GIS environment, they found that approximately 315 hectares of forest cover disappeared within the La Jagua mining area between 1990 and 2022, with another 138 hectares lost around the Calenturitas mine. The losses concentrated along riparian corridors, including the Tucuy River, where vegetation once buffered waterways and regulated seasonal flows. Farmers interviewed for the study reported that creeks which once ran year-round now flow only in the rainy season, and that freshwater turtles, native fish, and amphibians have largely vanished from waters they remember as abundant.

Air quality data tell a parallel story of slow-motion harm. Historical records of total suspended particles from the La Palmita station between 2001 and 2010 hovered just below Colombia’s national annual limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter, while the Boquerón station exceeded that threshold in 2008 and 2009. In 2007, the Ministry of Environment classified sections of the Cesar Mining Corridor as environmental pollution zones, and in 2010 Boquerón was formally declared uninhabitable. Yet as of 2024, a significant proportion of households remained in place, caught in a resettlement process stalled by administrative procedures, budget constraints, and regulatory negotiations. Residents described what researchers call double exposure: simultaneous contact with particulate contamination and institutional neglect. One community leader put it bluntly: We are stuck in the middle, contaminated, forgotten, and silenced.

What distinguishes this study is its refusal to stop at environmental measurement. The researchers deployed a framework known as the plural valuation of nature, aligned with the IPBES Values Assessment, which holds that ecosystems carry economic, social, ecological, cultural, and spiritual meanings simultaneously, and that reducing them to monetary terms erases the very values that make transition pathways legitimate. They surveyed 101 residents, conducted 21 semi-structured interviews across institutional, labor, and community groups, and asked participants to score five economic sectors, mining, agriculture, livestock, tourism, and commerce, across four dimensions: economic contribution, social well-being, ecological sustainability, and cultural compatibility.

The resulting valuation heatmap exposes a contradiction that conventional cost-benefit analysis would miss entirely. Mining scored highest in the economic dimension, with a mean of 3.57 on a five-point scale, reflecting real dependence on jobs, transport, and services. But it scored lowest in the ecological dimension at 2.31, and a paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test across 101 complete pairs confirmed the gap was statistically robust, with a mean difference of 1.27 points and a p-value of 1.79 times ten to the minus nine. Residents associated mining with respiratory illness, unequal benefit distribution, and weakened social trust. Agriculture, by contrast, earned its highest score in the cultural dimension at 4.07, tied to ancestral farming knowledge and food sovereignty, while tourism scored highest on ecological and cultural grounds despite weak current income potential.

Perceptions of decline were strikingly convergent. Soil degradation was cited by 81 percent of respondents, biodiversity loss by 73 percent, water deterioration by 67 percent, food insecurity by 61 percent, and cultural or emotional rupture by 47 percent. Farmers described soil that no longer breathes, where composting and crop rotation have lost their effectiveness and fallow land fails to recover. Women in Boquerón and La Palmita reported heavier domestic burdens hauling water from distant sources. Older residents, particularly women, described the painful erosion of ecological knowledge transmission, from identifying medicinal plants to reading seasonal cues, as planting cycles grew unpredictable and younger generations drifted from the land.

The study’s authors are careful not to romanticize the alternatives. Agriculture in La Jagua de Ibirico is a constrained pathway, limited by the very degradation mining caused: compacted soils, water scarcity, and diminished productivity that will require sustained technical and institutional support to reverse. Tourism is aspirational rather than immediately viable, dependent on air-quality improvement, riparian restoration, infrastructure, and security. The analytical point is subtler and more consequential: plural valuation reveals the direction communities want to travel, even when the road has not yet been built. Ignoring those non-economic values, the researchers argue, reproduces extractivist logic under a green banner, a critique increasingly aimed at transition policies across the Global South where corporate actors have appropriated transition narratives while extraction continues.

Gender emerged as a quietly powerful thread in the findings. Among the 101 respondents, 56 women and 45 men, exploratory chi-square tests found statistically significant associations between sex and both the economic and social valuation of mining. Qualitatively, women were especially vocal on health impacts, water quality, and caregiving burdens, articulating relational and care-based values that shaped deliberation. The authors suggest that future plural valuation exercises in extractive territories adopt gender-sensitive designs to capture these differentiated experiences systematically, rather than leaving them as anecdotal color in participatory workshops.

The deeper lesson radiating from this Colombian coal town is procedural, not merely technical. The Boquerón resettlement saga shows that legal recognition of harm means little without community power over timelines, criteria, and compensation, a textbook case of what environmental justice scholars call procedural justice failure. Residents have responded with community-led air monitoring, participatory mapping of lost territories, and youth-driven documentaries and podcasts documenting environmental injustice. Their articulated demands, compensation for health harms, investment in agroecology and community tourism, legal recognition of territorial practices, and youth training, sketch a transition measured in healing rather than megawatts. As one interviewee told the researchers: The land is wounded, and so are we. Transition means healing both. If the global energy transition is to be just anywhere, this study suggests, it must begin by listening to places like La Jagua de Ibirico, where the invoice for coal was paid long before anyone asked who would collect it.

Subject of Research: Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transition pathways in a coal-dependent Colombian municipality

Article Title: Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transitions: The case of La Jagua de Ibirico, Colombia

Article References: Regino Vergara, J., Rincón Ruíz, A., Mejía Brito, A., & Banda Pérez, A. (2026). Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transitions: The case of La Jagua de Ibirico, Colombia. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45538. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45538

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45538

Keywords: energy transition, coal mining, Colombia, environmental justice, plural valuation, post-extractivism, air quality, forest loss, participatory research, IPBES, just transition, La Jagua de Ibirico

The urgency behind the paper stems from the escalating ecological crisis and the growing recognition that the way humanity values nature shapes how it is protected or destroyed. People value nature in profoundly different ways: instrumentally, for the material benefits it provides; intrinsically, for its existence independent of any human observer; and relationally, through the meanings, identities and social bonds that arise from human–nature interactions. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, emphasized in its 2022 Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature that most current valuation processes capture only a narrow slice of these values, typically monetary and quantitative ones, which can produce environmental injustices and conflicts while ignoring worldviews of indigenous peoples and local communities.

To translate plural valuation into practice, researchers have identified four values-centered leverage points for transformative change: recognizing the diverse values of nature in valuation methods; embedding those values into decision-making; reforming policies, rights and regulations to internalize nature’s values; and shifting the deeper societal norms, beliefs and goals that underpin how people relate to nature and to each other. Drawing on leverage point theory popularized by Donella Meadows, the authors note that these intervention points cascade in depth—shallower points are easier to act on but yield less change, while deeper points are harder to activate but hold far greater transformative potential when engaged.

The new perspective, the product of two expert workshops hosted by the Open Universiteit in 2022 and 2023, systematically maps how citizen science can strengthen interventions at each of these leverage points. At the first point, recognizing diverse values, citizen science initiatives such as Drinkable Rivers, Curieuze Neuzen in Belgium, and the Dutch Network Ecological Monitoring demonstrate that the questions citizens ask and the species or landscapes they monitor often reflect deeply held values and concerns. Because participants are drawn from varied localities, socio-economic backgrounds and identities, their involvement can widen the spectrum of values that enter formal valuation, though the authors caution that environmental citizen science remains biased toward quantitative data collection, overrepresenting instrumental and intrinsic values while leaving relational values largely implicit.

Measuring relational values—attachments to places, species and nature in general—requires methodological innovation. The researchers point to emerging approaches such as citizens’ written letters to trees, micronarratives and behavioral data on species preferences, which can be combined with ecological measurements to illuminate socio-ecological interactions. They also flag a fundamental trade-off: methods capable of capturing rich detail about people’s values tend to be more complex and time-consuming, reducing the volume of data collected, while high-volume approaches may flatten the very diversity of values that plural valuation seeks to reveal.

At the second leverage point, embedding valuation into inclusive decision-making, the evidence is striking. Citizen-collected air quality data from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade in the United States and the Samen Meten program run by the Dutch national public health institute have shaped governmental policy agendas. In Europe, citizen observatories deliberately link citizens, scientists and decision-makers in shared monitoring of local environments. The authors document cases where citizen science has even entered the courtroom: plastic pollution data gathered by volunteers contributed to a petrochemical company being found liable, and species observations by Swedish citizens have been used in environmental court cases. Participation also reshapes personal decisions, with studies showing that citizen scientists adopt more biodiversity-friendly gardening practices and strengthen their personal connection to nature—effects that ripple outward through the communities and social networks these initiatives create.

Yet the path is not without obstacles. Doubts about the quality of citizen-generated data among scientists and policymakers, persistent power dynamics in decision-making circles, and a lack of agency, skills or resources among decision-makers all constrain uptake. Studies further reveal a persistent demographic skew: citizen science participants tend to be white, highly educated, older and more affluent, which narrows the knowledge produced and limits environmental justice. At the third, deeper leverage point of institutional reform, the authors highlight structural embedding efforts such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s agreement to involve citizens in knowledge co-creation and the more4nature initiative, which seeks to institutionalize collaboration between citizen science projects and authorities responsible for policy implementation and monitoring. But they also warn that institutionalization carries risks: when data flow into analytical pipelines, ties with the volunteers who collected them can weaken, and the sense of pride and emotional enrichment that motivates citizen scientists can erode if their knowledge becomes an untraceable instrument.

The deepest leverage point—shifting societal norms and paradigms—is where citizen science may hold its most profound potential. Empirical studies show that participation strengthens place attachment, nature connectedness and nature-noticing over both short and long timescales. Communities formed around monitoring projects build shared values and collective action, and so-called citizen science ambassadors inspire pro-environmental attitudes in their social circles. The authors caution, however, that it is methodologically difficult to distinguish values genuinely transformed by participation from values participants already held, and some longitudinal studies find no attitude change because participants began with strongly positive orientations toward nature. Measuring such shifts demands new approaches that explicitly track emotional connectedness and underlying norms.

From this analysis the team distills three overarching recommendations. First, recognize and measure: relational values must be made explicit in citizen science design, supported by new quantitative and qualitative methods, since they are both key motivations for participation and outcomes strengthened by it. Second, embrace diversity: plural valuation calls for plural publics, meaning the full variety of citizen science formats—from top-down governmental programs to grassroots community-led efforts—should be cultivated, with flexible roles that allow citizens, scientists and policymakers to grow into varied responsibilities. Third, pursue structural integration: case-by-case policy engagement is growing, but lasting change requires structural funding, long-term collaborations, storytelling that showcases how citizen science has informed decisions, and open science principles that ease institutionalization into policy processes.

The authors conclude that uniting citizen science and plural valuation is not merely an academic win–win but a necessary foundation for inclusive, effective environmental action and conservation. As governments worldwide struggle to meet biodiversity targets amid widening distrust in institutions, the perspective suggests a practical and democratizing pathway: the millions of volunteers already counting birds, measuring rivers and sensing air pollution are not just collecting data—they are articulating, practicing and fostering a richer, more plural vision of what nature is worth, and in doing so, they may be pulling the deepest levers of transformative change.

Subject of Research: Integrating citizen science with plural valuation of nature to leverage transformative change

Article Title: Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change

Article References: Verploegen, H., Dyke, A. J., Ganzevoort, W., Hugé, J., Jacobs, S., Neuteleers, S., Prats López, M., Verschuuren, B., & Wehn, U. (2026). Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Keywords: citizen science, plural valuation, transformative change, relational values, environmental policy, IPBES, leverage points, biodiversity, nature connectedness, environmental justice, Uniting, citizen