Boreal forests and lakes provide inspirational services to OpenNESS project team

The OpenNESS Project Steering Committee held its 9^th meeting on 2-4 September 2015. The team received a warm welcome by the coordination team from SYKE, who had arranged meeting space and facilities in Nuuksio National Park, close to Helsinki Airport. The fresh air, the quietness, the scenery, natural diversity and food were only some of the services that the Boreal forest and lake ecosystem offered in support of a very fruitful and constructive meeting.

Much of the Committee’s discussions concentrated on what is coming up in the remaining 1.5 years of OpenNESS, such as the process of synthesizing the rich outputs of all work packages and case studies and making this knowledge readily accessible to practitioners and other users. Key milestones as part of this process will be our upcoming all-parties workshop in early October in Leuven (Belgium), a one-day event in Brussels on 28 October dedicated to the SME community, a policy day next March to showcase and discuss our project outcome with European policymakers, and a final conference in September 2016, to be held jointly with the ESP, the OPERAs project and the ECOPLAN project. The Oppla platform that is currently in the making will have a key role to play in making the knowledge and the practical solutions for operationalising ecosystem services and natural capital readily available to a wide community of users and contributors.

Photo: The OpenNESS Project Steering Committee