The 4th ESP Europe Conference, which brings together ecosystem services’ experts and stakeholders from all around Europe, will take place on 10-14 October in Crete, Heraklion. It will be held in a hybrid format, allowing both online and face-to-face participation.
The conference will feature a wide range of sessions on ecosystem services. Session dedicated to the marine and coastal topics – “Plural values of marine and coastal ecosystem services towards sustainable spatial planning and an inclusive governance of marine and coastal systems” – will be co-hosted by the team of Baltic Environmental Forum – Latvia.
The marine and coastal social-ecological systems host a large amount of biological, genetic, functional and ecosystem diversity while offering the space for a multitude of interactions with society. European Union has proposed a new approach towards Sustainable Blue Economy, which targets simultaneously climate change mitigation through offshore energy production, a circular economy approach on the fisheries and shipping sector, while preserving coastal biodiversity and landscapes for the benefit of tourism and the economy. This multi-objective strategy is key to ensuring that multiple goals can be achieved, but at the same time its implementation is not straightforward as the research methods available to account for those goals are designed in a sectoral manner. Marine and coastal ecosystem services assessment can be key to ensure an integrated and inclusive assessment of the plural values of such systems and provide information to policy and decision-making in an integrated way.
While a lot of research has been already, approaches toward the inclusion of multiple values of marine and coastal systems, extending beyond the biophysical or economic value, to account for social and relational values are lacking. Also, methodological and policy approaches on how to account for the ecosystem service bundles and multiple values of marine systems are still scarce.
The goal of this session is therefore dual: to explore methods and approaches towards the inclusion of the plural values of marine and coastal ecosystems; and ways of accounting for the plural values of these systems towards a more inclusive planning and governance.
Organisers invite research teams who have been targeting the assessment of multiple, biophysical and social values of marine and coastal ecosystem services, to present their approaches, but also methods for including and involving society in their work. Call for abstracts is open until July 31, 2022.
More info & abstract submission: https://www.espconference.org/europe22/wiki/759349/call-for-abstracts
More info about all conference sessions, including the marine session (B1): https://www.espconference.org/europe22/wiki/754946/session-overview
Session “Plural values of marine and coastal ecosystem services towards sustainable spatial planning and an inclusive governance of marine and coastal systems” is a continuation of the work carried out by the Marine Biome Working group of ESP in cooperation with the Interreg Central Baltic project MAREA “From marine ecosystem accounting to integrated governance for sustainable planning of marine and coastal areas” and ERASMUS+ project Mare “Marine Coastal and Delta Sustainability for Southeast Asia”.
