Creating a marketplace for ecosystem services
This demonstration project has been successfully completed. The overall aim of NaturEtrade was to develop an innovative solution to the loss of ecologically-rich land in Europe.
This innovative project worked with landowners and businesses in different European countries (Portugal, Romania, Estonia, UK) to explore how they would utilise the tools and technologies we developed to trade in the commodity ‘ecosystem services’. The project developed a set of tools and technologies that bridges the gap between academic research and policy on ecosystem service provision, and its dissemination to private and public landowners.
In spite of their importance in sustaining human well-being, ecosystem services have not commonly been an object of private-market transactions. As a result, where ecosystem services are recompensed, it is almost exclusively via government incentives or charitable donation.
NaturEtrade was conceived as a tool to complement biodiversity offsetting schemes and help facilitate private markets for ecosystem services to develop, while simultaneously supporting improved ecosystem service provision by government and charities.
NaturEtrade is a free, easy-to-use, web-based, demonstration ecosystem service evaluation tool and trading platform that shows landowners how to measure the ecosystem services provided by their lands, and how they could contract with businesses for the continued and enhanced provision of these services. The measured ecosystem services are soil erosion, water regulation provision, pollination services, carbon sequestration, and cultural and recreational values.
NaturEtrade is a web-based platform that provides an efficient and scalable marketplace for ecosystem services. It takes a new approach to assessing the ecological potential of land in terms of the ecosystem services that it provides (e.g. the provision of drinking water, or pollination of crops), and then 'trading' these services.
The platform provides web-based tools which harness remote sensing technologies to transition the concept of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) from the domains of academia and policy into the land management and business sectors. It provides land managers with ecosystem service values for their land and thorough a secure platform enables payments to flow for the provision of these services from beneficiaries.
