Instruments is the technical arm of the project. It is helping to integrate tools/instruments into decision-making and practice of Ecosystem services. Using a demand analysis, OPERAs works out which tools need to be improved. There have been a number of instruments that have been prioritised based on their ability to overcome the following challenges:
- enhancing the coherence of ecosystem services related indicators sets
- broadening and further developing existing Life-cycle Assessment, Environmental Impact Assessment, Strategic Environmental Assessment and Social Impact Assessments
- testing participatory decision support tools and increasing their utility to stakeholders, and
- exploring evaluation and valuation tools for multi-criteria decision analysis, accounting schemes, trade-off analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and scenario and uncertainty analysis
While Knowledge identifies methods to assess, quantify, and value ecosystem services, Instruments addresses the operational and technical challenges in integrating the concepts into various new and improved instruments.
Operationally, Instruments addresses issues by:
- scoping the demand for ecosystem services concept uptake in different contexts
- developing improved information tools, decision support tools, instruments, novel applications, and enhanced schemes for implementation and uptake
- assessing the cost structure, cost-effectiveness and policy added-value of taking up ecosystem services concepts, and
- developing transferable generic and context-sensitive guidance to support concept mainstreaming, up-scaling, and extension whenever this adds value
Some recent publications by Instruments include:
Measuring ecosystem services: Guidance on developing ecosystem service indicators