Aquatic and Riparian Ecosystems: Biodiversity and Economic Service Transformations from NbS (ARE BEST NbS)

Biodiversity is essential for healthy ecosystems and human well-being. However, integrating individual and collective values for biodiversity into plans for managing aquatic and riparian habitats—such as rivers, floodplains, and wetlands—is challenging due to limited understanding of how these values are created and biodiversity’s exclusion from traditional market mechanisms. Decision-making becomes further complicated by variations in stakeholders' preferences, which are often poorly understood. ARE BEST NbS promotes stakeholder engagement and open communication while leveraging collaborative research methods from natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and design. By doing so, it enhances our understanding of biodiversity values and trade-offs, exploring how perceptions and experiences shape valuation, evaluation, and decision-making processes for biodiversity-promoting Nature-based Solutions (NbS). The project aims to use this knowledge, along with storytelling and performance lectures, to raise societal awareness of biodiversity's importance and provide evidence-based recommendations to improve stakeholder engagement and policy decisions regarding NbS investments. The project includes a multi-country survey on the topic of NbS targeting the general population as well as specific case studies. At the University of Minho in Portugal, research focuses on riparian forests in the River Ave basin and constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment, analyzing decision-making among diverse stakeholders. The University of Southern Denmark examines the Vejle NbS coastal adaptation project, which enhances resilience to storm surges, and explores how lived experiences influence valuation through surveys. At Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Hungary, the Lake Balaton Living Infrastructures project promotes biodiversity through innovative lakeshore protection and engages stakeholders in data storytelling and physical visualization related to aquatic NbS.

To promote credible and legitimate Nature-based Solutions (NbS), our transdisciplinary objectives focus on understanding how stakeholders perceive biodiversity, how lived experiences shape these views, and how these interact with valuation, evaluation, and decision-making processes for NbS promoting biodiversity. The project explores four key questions: stakeholder engagement, project evaluation strategies, improving engagement and evaluation, and the role of artistic collaboration and mental models in valuing biodiversity and natural capital. The project uses methodologies from the humanities, design, and social and natural sciences to map stakeholder perceptions, identifying discrepancies and inaccuracies that enhance engagement strategies. By examining past NbS investments, it uncovers patterns in stakeholder influence on biophysical and value changes. It emphasizes immersive art, co-design, and data storytelling as tools to explore the interaction between NbS and biodiversity. Modern causal inference methods are applied to analyze biodiversity and ecosystem service values in past projects, while stated preference techniques assess values in current and potential NbS initiatives. These methods help clarify how shifts in wealth, population, and economic activities affect ecosystem services. To address uncertainties, the project extends traditional cost-benefit analyses through real options analysis, assessing the value of postponing investments to reduce uncertainties around costs and benefits. The project also advances stated preference study methodologies, refining choice experiments and addressing hypothetical biases. Its societal relevance lies in enhancing the integration of ecosystem services into analysis frameworks, fostering stakeholder engagement, and promoting open communication in NbS implementation. The project ultimately seeks to understand synergies and trade-offs of NbS for human well-being. [See ARE BEST NbS proposal for details]