Abstract
The purpose of the project is to identify appropriate policy means for biodiversity protection in an interdisciplinary context where a common basis for understanding of challenges to biodiversity will be developed through cooperation between natural scientists and social scientists. The project suggests a specific application for policy analysis of the Nature Index (NI) in Norway, a recently developed framework for quantifying biodiversity. In particular, the project addresses how the various elements of biodiversity can be expressed in terms of different disciplinary and societal perspectives (so-called narratives) that illustrate how different parts of society, different interest groups, conflicting sector interests, lay people and politicians understand and express their understandings of biodiversity, threats to biodiversity, and the policies for biodiversity protection. A major challenge will be to express biodiversity targets for the two major ecosystems open lowlands and forests in terms of the indicators from the Nature Index. This must be done in a way that can be translated into environmental management strategies. These strategies will then be described in economic terms. Two economic models will be developed for evaluation of ecosystem services. For open lowland an economic model of production methods will be extended to cover activities that re-establish and sustain open lowland. For forest a model for carbon sequestration will be developed and expressed in terms of an economic evaluation. The project will contribute to enhance the basis for adaptive planning by economic policy means, where adaptive planning is understood as iterative implementation of policy means towards reaching a given policy objective for biodiversity. The results will be communicated to important national users as the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance.
Norway