To what extent is there a risk that too many tools are being developed without establishing or winning the case for mainstreaming ecosystem services in the built environment?
(This question was posed during the webinar 'How to link ecosystem services, knowledge, tools and practice?'. Please add your comments and questions.)
Topics:
Ecosystem services
Comments
#1
That’s a really good question. There’s a lot of scientific knowledge out there, there are a lot of tools and methods. I think what one needs to do is think about this in context, in the sense that not all of the tools and methods that are available are pertinent to all given situations or context. So if you start looking at a given area or problem domain, such as the built environment, it may only be a limited subset of the universe of tools that would be appropriate to address questions within that context. The other important point to bear in mind is, this is one of the motivating factors of why we wanted to build the Oppla system: because the purpose of that is that users go to the system, they can see previous case studies (of which there are many examples within the Oppla system), and they can see where given tools have been useful in a given context. You can check the case study; you can see what people are saying about the tools that were useful to them and also the tools that were not interesting to them. So that provides a way of filtering, to some extent, the large number of available methods that are out there for users to use.