By Oleksandr Karasov and Henrikki Tenkanen
This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.
Every time we take a walk in a park or sit by a lake, something happens to us that is hard to put a price on. Time there feels different from time spent in traffic or in a queue. We all know this. But when planners and policymakers try to value nature for the benefits it gives people, they usually run into one of two problems. Either they translate everything into money, which feels wrong when describing the bond between a person and a beloved landscape. Or they use long lists of qualitative descriptions that are rich and insightful but very hard to compare across places and across time. In our paper, we propose a different approach, inspired by streaming services like Spotify or Netflix.
Rather than asking people what nature is worth in euros, we suggest asking a much simpler question after spending time in or with nature: Did this feel like time well spent, or did it feel like time wasted? People implicitly answer this kind of question every day when they rate films, songs, or restaurants. A similar rating, attached to specific places and activities, could become a universal way to capture the experiences nature actually gives us.
We demonstrate how participatory mapping apps on people’s phones could collect such ratings, and how the same apps could give something back: personalised recommendations for places where people with similar tastes have had an especially good time. We call this idea PPGIS 2.0. It would not replace existing tools, but it would add a comparable, easy-to-understand signal of how much each place enriches the lives of the people who visit it.
If managers and planners had access to such data, they could start managing places based not only on traditional visit counts, but also on the quality of the time those people have. That would be a small but meaningful shift in how environmental decisions are made.
