The costs of increasing precision for ecosystem services valuation studies

Ecosystem services valuation (ESV) is increasingly used to provide the impetus to sustainably manage and restore ecosystems. When undertaking an ESV study, the available resources, desired scope, and necessary precision must be considered before determining the most appropriate approach. A broad range of techniques exist to support valuation studies, requiring a range of financial, time, and personnel resources. We surveyed authors that completed 56 responses around valuation studies regarding their total costs (including personnel costs) and the perceived precision of their results. Results show that the perceived precision of their results is statistically significant and increases with the cost of a study (adjusted R2 = 0.29, p = 0.018) and the number of person years required to complete it (R2 = 0.31, p = 0.22). Understanding the trade-offs between the costs of the study and the precision of the results allows policymakers and practitioners to make more informed decisions about which ESV methods are most cost effective for their needs. For example, basic value transfer techniques require minimal resources to implement but lack precision in the final estimates, while integrated modelling techniques provide dynamic, spatially explicit, and more precise estimates but are significantly more expensive and time consuming to implement. However, these techniques are not mutually exclusive. A quick, inexpensive initial analysis may support and motivate more elaborate and detailed studies

Building a sustainable and desirable economy-in-society-in-nature

This report is a synthesis of ideas about what this new economy-in-society-innature could look like and how we might get there. Most of the ideas presented here are not new. The coauthors of this report have published them in various forms over the last several decades, and many others have expressed similar ideas in venues too numerous to mention. What is new is the timing and the situation. The time has come when we must make a transition. We have no choice. Our present path is clearly unsustainable. As Paul Raskin has said, Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is business as usual that is the utopian fantasy; forging a new vision is the pragmatic necessity [10]. But we do have a choice about how to make the transition and what the new state of the world will be. We can engage in a global dialogue to envision the future we want, the theme of Rio+20, and then devise an adaptive strategy to get us there, or we can allow the current system to collapse and rebuild from a much worse starting point. We obviously argue for the former strategy. In this report, we discuss the need to focus more directly on the goal of sustainable human well-being rather than merely GDP growth. This includes protecting and restoring nature, achieving social and intergenerational fairness (including poverty alleviation), stabilizing population, and recognizing the significant nonmarket contributions to human well-being from natural and social capital. To do this, we need to develop better measures of progress that go well beyond GDP and begin to measure human well-being and its sustainability more directly

Understanding the (non-)Use of Societal Wellbeing Indicators in National Policy Development : What Can We Learn from Civil Servants? A UK Case Study

Gross Domestic Product is often used as a proxy for societal well-being in the context of policy development. Its shortcomings in this context are, however, well documented, and numerous alternative indicator sets have been developed. Despite this, there is limited evidence of widespread use of these alternative indicator sets by people working in policy areas relevant to societal wellbeing. Civil servants are an important group of indicator end-users. Better understanding their views concerning measuring societal wellbeing can support wider discussions about what factors determine indicator use and influence in policy decision-making. Taking the UK as a case study, we ask what views exist among civil servants in the UK about measuring societal well-being? To answer this question, we used a bootstrapped Q methodology, interviewing 20 civil servants to elicit their views about measuring societal well-being. Three distinct discourses emerged from our analysis: one that was concerned about the consequences of ignoring natural, social and human capital in decision making; one that emphasised opportunity and autonomy as key determinants of well-being; and one that focused on the technical aspects of measuring societal well-being. Each of these discourses has direct implications for the way that we integrate societal wellbeing into policy making and highlights the potential benefits of including end-users in indicator development and strategy

The IPBES Conceptual Framework - connecting nature and people

The first public product of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is its Conceptual Framework. This conceptual and analytical tool, presented here in detail, will underpin all IPBES functions and provide structure and comparability to the syntheses that IPBES will produce at different spatial scales, on different themes, and in different regions. Salient innovative aspects of the IPBES Conceptual Framework are its transparent and participatory construction process and its explicit consideration of diverse scientific disciplines, stakeholders, and knowledge systems, including indigenous and local knowledge. Because the focus on co-construction of integrative knowledge is shared by an increasing number of initiatives worldwide, this framework should be useful beyond IPBES, for the wider research and knowledge-policy communities working on the links between nature and people, such as natural, social and engineering scientists, policy-makers at different levels, and decision-makers in different sectors of society

Stress scolaire des collégiens et des lycéens : effet de l’appréhension de l’orientation et de la pression de la note

International audienc

Validité de construit du questionnaire rBVQ d’Olweus pour l’évaluation du harcèlement scolaire (bullying) auprès d’élèves français de cycle 3

International audienceLes « jeux dangereux » et particulièrement les « jeux de non-oxygénation » deviennent des phénomènes sociaux parmi les enfants et les adolescents, qu’ils soient ou non en milieu scolaire. Après une rigoureuse revue de la littérature, cette étude pilote a investigué le contexte d’initiation des enfants aux activités de non-oxygénation, a recueilli leur opinion sur ce type de pratique et a enquêté sur leurs préférences de jeux. Un total de 246 enfants, d’âge moyen 11,6 ans (10–14 ans), issus majoritairement de classes de sixième de trois collèges y ont participé. Les informations ont été recueillies à l’aide d’un questionnaire ad hoc qu’ils ont rempli de manière anonyme. Les résultats montrent que presque 1 enfant sur 4 (n = 61) déclare avoir déjà expérimenté une pratique dangereuse de ce type. L’âge d’initiation est parfois très précoce (4 ans), et les lieux d’initiation sont variés (école, rue, Internet, maison). La fréquence des pratiques va de « 2 ou 3 fois par mois » à « tous les jours ». L’impact des actions de prévention est flagrant : 31 % des pratiquants déclarent n’avoir reçu aucune information contre 9 % des non-pratiquants. L’ensemble des données montre que le phénomène est complexe, alliant probablement des éléments de pression groupale, de recherche de sensations, d’influence de l’Internet, de négligence éducative et des facteurs de personnalité