Co$tingNature

Audience: Conservation and development NGOs, GO and NGO Policy analysts, agriculture and industry (e.g. extractives), education and academic research.

Focus: The Co$tingNature PSS is a sophisticated web-based spatial policy support system for natural capital accounting and analysing the ecosystem services provided by natural environments (i.e. nature's benefits), identifying the beneficiaries of these services and assessing the impacts of human interventions. This PSS is a testbed for the development and implementation of conservation strategies focused on sustaining and improving ecosystem services. It also focused on enabling the intended and unintended consequences of development actions on ecosystem service provision to be tested in silico before they are tested in vivo . The PSS incorporates detailed spatial datasets at 1-square km and 1 hectare resolution for the entire World, spatial models for biophysical and socioeconomic processes along with scenarios for climate and land use. The PSS calculates a baseline for current ecosystem service provision and allows a series of interventions (policy options) or scenarios of change to be used to understand their impact on ecosystem service delivery. We do not focus on valuing nature (how much someone is willing to pay for it) but rather costing it (understanding the resource e.g. land area and opportunity cost of nature being protected to produce the ecosystem services that we need and value).

Though we provide input data for application of this model anywhere globally (from remote sensing and other global sources) users can also use this model with their own datasets.  Application with the provided datasets takes only half an hour and requires no GIS capacity.  Bringing in your own datasets will take much longer depending on the availability, level of processing, format and consistency of those datasets and also requires GIS capacity.  Typical applications include ecosystem service assessment, conservation prioritization, analysis of co-benefits e.g. for REDD+ and analysis of pressures and threats on carbon and biodiversity in general or for specific planned agricultural, industrial or extractive interventions.  

For those who require a simpler tool, Co$tingNatureMap provides access to baseline and scenario runs of Co$tingNature globally and regionally and allows - at the click of a button - comparison between sites where conservation or development investments are planned.  

Co$tingNature/global is a dashboard of national-scale nature and poverty metrics designed for understanding dependencies of and risks to nature ion relation to poverty and development metrics for nature-investment prioritisation, access here)

Co$tingNature/local is a hyper-resolution version of Co$tingNature applied to specific sites at resolutions from 1m-100m often integrated with FreeStation low-cost environmental monitoring , see for example Kalu Oya, Sri Lanka (30m resolution) and Spains Hall Estate (10m resolution)

Training videos | Example applications |  Need an expert to apply this tool for you

Geographical coverage: global

Spatial resolution: 10 degree tiles, countries and major basins @ 1km resolution. 1 degree tiles @ 1-hectare resolution. Sub-basins or local administrative areas @ 10m resolution (licensed). Globally applicable, locally relevant. Also global 10km and continental 1km (not possible on public servers)

Temporal resolution: Baseline (1950-2000) and scenario

Development status: 

History: Geodiversity model developed 1999, Costing Nature static global analysis 2007, version 1 2009, version 2 2011

Version 1: completed 2009

Version 2: complete 2012

Version 3: completed 2017

Versions:

The version 1 model covers water, carbon, hazard mitigation, nature-based tourism, biodiversity and conservation priority as well as current pressures and future threats.  It currently does not include land use and climate scenarios, see here

Previous version 1 Map four potential and realised ecosystem services, biodiversity, pressure and threat, as scalar indices, indexed locally to the analysis area or globally. (faster but less sophisticated)

Previous version 2 Improved models and functionality, including analyses by country and basin, still four ecosystem services

Current Version 3. Thirteen ecosystem services, biodiversity, pressure and threat indexed locally (only local beneficiaries accounted for) or globally( all beneficiaries accounted for).  Also with (total) economic valuation of services and SDGs metrics.

Key users:  see here

Profiled in:  Eco4Biz - Ecosystem services and biodiversity tools to support business decision-making, Nature in the balance, Mongabay, Biology Letters, BSR, Ecosystem services,  WLE, EKN, Oppla, EKLIPSE, Values, SDG Knowledge Hub, BSR, CCB standards

Documentation: 

Model and data documentation can be found here and system (interface and functionality) documentation here. A presentation on the science behind the PSS can be found here (English) and here (Spanish) [opens in Google docs viewer]. Download:  (EN, ES). A powerpoint demo of the system functionality is here (English) and here (Spanish) [opens in Google docs viewer]. Download: (EN, ES).  Documentation for version 2 is here.    Documentation for version 3 is here