Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Scoping Tool (FST): Identify and Prioritize Stakeholders and Ecosystem Services At Your Site
Citation:
Sharpe, L. Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Scoping Tool (FST): Identify and Prioritize Stakeholders and Ecosystem Services At Your Site. ERAF EGS informational webinar for RPMs & more, NA, FL, November 03, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
Present an overview of the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Scoping Tool to the contaminated sites community to provide them with a basic understanding of the tool's purpose and functionality and how it could be incorporated into the contaminated site managment process.
Description:
Consideration of ecosystem services is important for decisions that have an impact on the environment, including decisions related to managment of contaminated sites. The impacts of these decisions on ecosystem services, however, can be overlooked in favor of the impacts on other socioeconomic criteria. Identification of more relevant ecosystem services allows them to be more influential in the decision-making process and reduces the likelihood that decisions will have unintended consequences for benefits of the environment valued by the community. A long list of ecosystem services can be hard to narrow down and the relevant ecosystem services likely to shift along with the stakeholder groups and the decision contexts. The Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Scoping Tool is designed to help decision makers identify and prioritize stakeholder groups, the ways they are benefiting from the ecosystem, and the aspects of the environment necessary to realize those benefits. The tool was built to be flexible in its application to accommodate a variety of uses and decision context and could be usefully incorporated into the contaminated site management process. Decisions with environmental repercussions can be complex, and relevant and meaningful environmental decision criteria, let alone ecosystem services decision criteria, can be hard to identify and incorporate into the decision-making process. The tool aims to facilitate that process in a way is easy for a wide range of decisions and decision makers.