Sander Jacobs

Research Institute for Nature and Forest | INBO · Research Group Nature & Society

Pursuing economic targets of job creation, growth and innovation while tackling global environmental challenges has long been seen as impossible. However, any long-term economic competitiveness and security depends on the extent to which natural resources are used sustainably. Therefore, the European Union is investing in nature-based solutions to...

The purpose of this paper is to show that bringing together legal science and other sciences in integrated valuation of ecosystem services can contribute for environmental justice and ensure fair and acceptable answers to complex real life questions. Legal science provides the teleological framework necessary to prevent ethical deadlocks. To this...

We are increasingly confronted with severe social and economic impacts of environmental degradation all over the world. From a valuation perspective, environmental problems and conflicts originate from trade-offs between values. The urgency and importance to integrate nature's diverse values in decisions and actions stand out more than ever. Valuat...

The Values Assessment (VA) of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that while a wide range of valuation methods exist to include nature's values in diverse decision-making contexts, uptake of these methods remains limited. Building on the VA, this paper reviews five critical steps in the evaluat...

This paper critically examines the current political context in which valuation studies of nature are undertaken. It challenges the belief that somehow, more and technically better valuation will drive the societal change toward more just and sustainable futures. Instead, we argue that current and proposed valuation practices risk to continue to ov...

The Values Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science- Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that multiple valuation methods and approaches exist to assess diverse value types. The evidence is based on the largest review of academic valuation studies on nature to date, developed for the Values Assessment of the Intergovernme...

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis³ still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property ri...

With growing urban populations and increasing demands for more liveable, healthy and resilient cities, green infrastructure (GI) emerged over the last decade as a strategy to improve the quality of life in urban areas, delivering ecological, socio-cultural and economic benefits. To reach the European Union’s political ambitions, it is vital that th...

Nature-based solutions are claimed to offer an effective approach to tackle societal challenges and promote biodiversity. While research has mainly focused on biodiversity and material ecosystem services, non-material contributions and relational values of urban green spaces remain underexplored. How to balance the benefits of nature, well-being, a...

Le rapport de 2020 de « l’évaluation mondiale de la biodiversité et des services écosystémiques » de la Plateforme intergouvernementale scientifique et politique sur la biodiversité et les services écosystémiques (IPBES) indique que la nature et ses contributions aux populations jouent un rôle important non seulement pour la santé de la planète, ma...

Comparing the impacts of future scenarios is essential for developing and guiding the political sustainability agenda. This review-based analysis compares six IPBES scenarios for their impacts on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 20 biodiversity targets (Aichi targets) for the Europe and Central Asia regions. The comparison is based on a...

The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) was established in 2011, and is now one of the major international social-ecological systems (SES) research networks. During this time, SES research has undergone a phase of rapid growth and has grown into an influential branch of sustainability science. In this Perspective, we argue that SES res...

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)’ 2020 “Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services” states that nature and its contributions to people play an important role not only for the health of the planet, but also to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. It highlighted no...

This is the final text version of Chapter 1. A laid-out version of the full assessment report will be made available in the coming months.

Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ec...

With increasing urbanisation, urban green spaces are expected to be crucial for urban resilience and sustainability, through the delivery of ecological, economic and social benefits. In practice, however, planning, management and evaluation of urban green spaces are rarely structured and evidence-based. This represents a missed opportunity to accou...

Met het concept ‘Natuurbijdragen’ wordt er een nieuw denkkader naar voren geschoven voor het IPBES, het intergouvernementeel Platform voor Biodiversiteit en Ecosysteemdiensten, ter vervanging van een denkkader rond het concept ‘ecosysteemdiensten’. Dat voorstel leidde tot een fel debat binnen wetenschappelijke kringen. Die felheid suggereert dat er...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) initiated in 2001 aims to assess the impacts of human pressure on ecosystem services (ES) and human well-being. Since then, the ES have been a worldwide concern, namely regarding to biodiversity loss and land use management (MA, 2005). The EU 2010 Biodiversity Baseline Report stated that 65% of habitats of E...

The document addresses the governance concept, and analyses its added value through an integrated area-oriented approach / operation, presenting the ‘Stiemerbeek’ valley, in Belgium, as an example. It then elaborates on how can a city operationalize collaborative governance for green infrastructure, arguing that a collaborative governance style wit...

This document reports on governance-related issues regarding urban area-oriented and integrated green projects. It presents an integrated area-oriented approach, focusing on the case study of the Stiemerbeek valley.

Decisions on the use of nature reflect the values and rights of individuals, communities and society at large. The values of nature are expressed through cultural norms, rules and legislation, and they can be elicited using a wide range of tools, including those of economics. None of the approaches to elicit peoples’ values are neutral. Unequal pow...

Relational values are values of desirable relationships between people and nature and among people (through nature). We report on the approach to capture relational values of nature’s contributions to people in the regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services...

The end of the first working program of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provided an opportunity to draw lessons from its work. This perspective paper captures insights from ecosystem services (ES) researchers and practitioners, largely drawing from the European context (referred to herein...

Introduction The complex links and feedbacks between ecosystems and people are now sharply in focus. Our growing understandings of the complex relations between ecosystems and people, the social and ecological drivers of changes in nature, and the different dimensions of a good quality of life, from local to global scales, have made these interdepe...

Multifunctionality refers to the capacity of an area to supply multiple ecosystem functions or services. While many conceptual and methodological advances have focused on defining and quantifying multifunctionality, the challenge of dealing with cross-scale dynamics of multifunctionality remains open. This study proposes a new way of measuring mult...

Scenarios are a useful tool to explore possible futures of social-ecological systems. The number of scenarios has increased dramatically over recent decades, with a large diversity in temporal and spatial scales, purposes, themes, development methods, and content. Scenario archetypes generically describe future developments and can be useful in mea...

Access to ecosystem services and influence on their management are structured by social relations among actors, which often occur across spatial scales. Such cross-scale social relations can be analysed through a telecoupling framework as decisions taken at local scales are often shaped by actors at larger scales. Analyzing these cross-scale relati...

Decision makers are increasingly interested in information from ecosystem services (ES) assessments. Scientists have for long recognised the importance of selecting appropriate indicators. Yet, while the amount and variety of indicators developed by scientists seems to increase continuously, the extent to which the indicators truly inform decision...

Forested catchments are generally assumed to provide higher quality water in opposition to agricultural and urban catchments. However, this should be tested in various ecological contexts and through the study of multiple variables describing water quality. Indeed, interactions between ecological variables, multiple land use and land cover (LULC) t...

The Ecosystem Services (ES) concept highlights the varied contributions the environment provides to humans and there are a wide range of methods/tools available to assess ES. However, in real-world decision contexts a single tool is rarely sufficient and methods must be combined to meet practitioner needs. Here, results from the OpenNESS project ar...

The operational challenges of integrated ecosystem service (ES) appraisals are determined by study purpose, system complexity and uncertainty, decision-makers' requirements for reliability and accuracy of methods, and approaches to stakeholder-science interaction in different decision contexts. To explore these factors we defined an information gap...

We spent quite a while as professional brother Seamuses before we discovered Karl is a mutual friend of ours. And sitting together with some beers, it occurred to us that there were more ideas we had in common. So we decided to pool resources. Karl, being the expert, has been quite influential on both our achievements and it's time to share this wi...

The concept of ecosystem services (ESs) has become a popular tool for science that aims to support decision making for sustainable management of natural resources. With the aim to integrate nature’s diverse values in decisions and to reach effective actions, it is recommended that valuations begin with a participatory identification of the most rel...

As the ecosystem service concept has become more widely recognised, so the number of biophysical, socio-cultural and monetary methods available to assess ecosystem services has increased. There is relatively little guidance on how to select and combine these methods into hybrid approaches that address policy purposes. Based on experiences from 27 c...

Global sustainability initiatives are gaining momentum and impact, and place-based research can provide complementary insights to strengthen them. Here, we explore the current and potential role of place-based research into informing global sustainability initiatives by assessing the strengths, challenges, and opportunities. We show that place-base...

Spatial planning has to deal with trade-offs between various stakeholders’ wishes and needs as part of planning and management of landscapes, natural resources and/or biodiversity. To make ecosystem services (ES) trade-off research more relevant for spatial planning, we propose an analytical framework, which puts stakeholders, their land-use/manage...

A range of methods are available for assessing ecosystem services. Methods differ in their aims; from mapping and modelling the supply and demand of ecosystem services to appraising their economic and non-economic importance through valuation techniques. Comprehensive guidance for the selection of appropriate ecosystem service assessment methods th...

Forested catchments are generally assumed to provide higher quality water. However, this hypothesis must be validated in various contexts as interactions between multiple land use and land cover (LULC) types, ecological variables and water quality variables render this relationship highly complex. This paper applies a straightforward multivariate a...

We are increasingly confronted with severe social and economic impacts of environmental degradation all over the world. From a valuation perspective, environmental problems and conflicts originate from trade-offs between values. The urgency and importance to integrate nature's diverse values in decisions and actions stand out more than ever. Valua...

With the case of Flanders (northern part of Belgium) we present an integrated approach to calculate accurate losses of wetlands, potentials for restoration, and their ecosystem services supplies and illustrate how these insights can be used to evaluate and support policy making. Flanders lost about 75% of its wetland habitats in the past 50–60 year...

The ECOPLAN project developed a range of methods and tools that allow to integrate the scientific knowledge of ecosystem services in spatial planning. The ECOPLAN tools can be used at various stages of the planning process (analysis, vision, planning, implementation, evaluation). Tools can often be useful in multiple stages. The ECOPLAN tools have...

The trade in soybean, an important animal feed product, exemplifies the environmental and socio-economic impact of global markets and global agricultural policy. This paper analyses the impact of increasing production of soybean in the exporting countries (deforestation and grassland conversion) as well as in importing regions (decrease in permanen...

Monetary value per ecosystem service and land use. (PDF)

Trade-off is a very popular term in the ES literature, but covers a wider array of phenomena, such as conflicting land-uses, a negative correlation between spatial occurrences of ES, ES incompatibilities, rivalry and excludability of ES, etc. Despite its popularity, the intuitive definition of ‘ES trade-offs’ and its antonym ‘ES synergies’ lack con...

Decision-making about nature needs to address values, therefore policy-making and management need assessment and valuation methods. But the association of ‘valuation’ with ‘money’ and ‘economics’, while a powerful language to some in certain contexts, is also alienating to others in many situations. ‘Integrated valuation’ aims to provide valuati...