Digital solution for mainstreaming ecosystem services knowledges

This project intends to start a bigger project towards a holistic scalable digital tool for incorporating knowledges about ecosystem services into workflows of urban planners (public and private), architects and development companies.

The prototype intends to be a user friendly way of interacting, learning and incorporating ecosystem services in their work.

Ecosystem services is a name for all the different benefits provided to humans by natural environments and healthy ecosystems.

The benefits range from the very simple - plants clean the air, purify water, bind the soil - to the complex - where the effects of the natural environments are linked with personal and community wellbeing and mental health. Ecosystems are under historic risk because of climate change and other emergencies like biodiversity loss.

This is driving the demand to live and design for life in balance with the natural ecosystems.

One of the major application areas of ecosystems services is in the infrastructure planning and building process in cities and urban environments.

Thus research and knowledges about ecosystem services is constantly growing and moving from the purely academic towards practical implementations based on the learnings.

This is creating a growing demand of having them made accessible in planning and building processes by different actors like architects, urban planners, municipalities, development companies and even active citizen groups.The benefit of incorporating ecosystem services into the design of community and urban development projects is obvious.

A changing climate makes our communities more vulnerable and therefore ecosystem services become even more important for economic, ethical and health reasons.

For this to become an obvious part of community building, the tools need to be developed and become more user-friendly.There is work being done in Sweden and internationally with ecosystem services in the form of work processes and tools for creating understanding about local ecosystems and how they might be used in planning and building processes in specific contexts but they remain difficult to understand.

This growing portfolio of work pushes the subject higher up in importance but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of their use experience for wider audiences.

This project proposes to bring in a wider understanding of stakeholder needs in the use of ecosystem service knowledges into their work.

Thereby expanding on the applications like ESTER 2.0 by Boverket and other publicly available tools to make them suited for the right stakeholders by making them more user friendly and easy to understand.