The ARIES team has attended the 6th Ecosystem Services Partnership Europe Conference (ESP Europe 2026) held in Prague under the theme “Advancing ecosystem services knowledge for achieving a nature- and people-positive Europe.”.
Bringing together scientists, policymakers, and practitioners from across Europe and beyond, the conference has provided a space to exchange ideas and discuss approaches for ecosystem services and sustainability.
Throughout the event, ARIES team members have contributed through presentations, workshops, and discussions focused on ecosystem accounting, climate adaptation, biodiversity monitoring, and AI-driven semantic modelling tools for sustainability. ARIES also hosted Session “Advancing natural capital accounting: connecting the dots between ecosystem extent, condition, and services.”, which has fostered discussions on how to better connect ecological data, ecosystem services, and policy-relevant indicators.
Highlights from ARIES Contributions
Urban heat adaptation and environmental justice
Sudeshna Kumar and Megan Critchley presented “Cooling for whom, cooling where? A justice-oriented framework for urban heat adaptation” exploring how urban heat adaptation strategies can better account for equity and justice when designing climate resilience measures in cities.
Coastal protection ecosystem services
Sudeshna Kumar, and Caterina Gilli presented: “Evaluating Coastal Protection Ecosystem Services: A Population-Based Assessment of Nature-Related Risks.” A work that examined how ecosystem services approaches can support the assessment of coastal protection benefits and nature-related risks affecting populations and vulnerable areas.
Ecosystem Mapping Workshop
The team also delivered the One-Click Ecosystem Mapping workshop, where Alessio Bulckaen provided hands-on insights into monitoring ecosystems and biodiversity. The workshop introduced tools designed to help countries monitor ecosystems and biodiversity while facilitating reporting for SEEA-EA ecosystem accounts and GBF Headline Indicator A.2.
Semantic Digital Twins
Ferdinando Villa presented an innovative digital architecture for federated, event-driven computational workflows.Each digital-twin is a dynamic, reproducible digital science environment that autonomously reacts to events and integrates diverse data and model services.Its core architecture includes a persistent knowledge graph for semantic linking and a scheduler for managing temporal and reactive updates. Digital twins are scalable by merging their knowledge graphs and schedules, following FAIR Principles for accountability and provenance tracking.
As discussions continue beyond the conference, ARIES looks forward to building on the ideas and connections developed in Prague and contributing to the evolving landscape of ecosystem services and natural capital accounting.
