Knowledge Assessment Platform for the valuation of Energy and Nature together (KAPtEN)

The work to help internationalise ADVENT and facilitate assessment of its findings in the long term will be conducted in three phases.

In the initial phase, KAPtEN and ADVENT teams will produce a set of questions and initial statements that are relevant internationally and that will be explored further, building on ADVENT's four initial workshops. In particular, a workshop on the role of energy in ecosystem services and natural capital conceptual frameworks will set the basis for characterising the impacts of specific energy chains and energy infrastructure development on the UK's marine, aquatic, coastal and terrestrial environments, and understand how different means of sourcing energy from outside the UK would impact global ecosystem services. Similarly, a workshop on currently projected energy pathways will look at what we currently know about the nexus between energy, land and water and the trade-offs and synergies associated with different patterns of energy development. These are important topics that will grow with the increasing pressure and desire to move towards a sustainable use of resources. The very first contribution of KAPtEN will be to develop a simplified web portal to facilitate the crowd-sourcing of a literature review around each of the questions and statements arising from these workshops, which will be turned into a databank of resources exportable in reference management systems (e.g. Endnote).

In the second phase, a new, professional-looking and easy to use ICT platform will be developed and tested on the valuation of Energy and Nature together. The principle behind the ICT platform is that users more easily react to statements that are already made, by confirming or contradicting them. Thus the ICT platform will start from a set of key statements that together will form the 'Map of Current Knowledge' - or the MoCK. The ICT platform hosting the MoCK statements will include options to link new research papers and to explain how these papers support, challenge, or contradict the existing statements. Anyone can link papers, not just the authors. This is the crowd-sourcing part of the project. If a paper is linked to a MoCK statement, the authors (who are the 'experts'), will be invited to revise the explanations if they wish and to rank other papers up or down, so that with time the papers voted 'up' by most experts will appear at the top.

In the final phase, we will publish 10-20 key statements on the valuation of Energy and Nature together, in a joint ADVENT-KAPtEN effort, including international partners, and co-chaired by senior colleagues with extensive experience, to be submitted to a high-impact journal (e.g. Nature Energy). These 10-20 statements will be the ADVENT MoCK that will be posted on the KAPtEN ICT platform and start the continuous assessment process of forming the Map of New Knowledge - or the MoNK.

We will use our extensive networks through connections with our international partners, Future Earth, Tyndall Centre partners, IPBES, IPCC and others to invite people to link their papers and show how they inform the assessment made in ADVENT with their international knowledge.

As the KAPtEN ICT platform develops, we will be working with Future Earth and IPBES partners to develop other MoCKs, so that with time, KAPtEN will make a step change in our capacity to transparently and continuously assess the state of science, inter-link fields such as Energy and Nature, and inform policy of the environment and beyond. One of our international project partner said 'this ICT platform has the potential to revolutionize the way scientific assessments are done, by opening up the process for contributions by the entire research community, and by establishing a transparent yet organized set of rules to highlight the emerging consensus and issues'.

KAPtEN will create novel international collaborations that will lead to excellent research. The ADVENT community is mostly UK focussed and weakly connected to global change programmes. The KAPtEN team provides a platform to reach out beyond the UK and to link with the international community, building an extensive network with researchers in Stanford University (USA), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA; Austria), the Stockholm Resilience Centre of Stockholm University (Sweden), the Sustainability Institute of Monash University (Austria), the Potsdam Institute (PIK; Germany) with strong links with the wider communities of experts from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Global Carbon Project (GCP), and Future Earth. The ICT platform will provide support to integrate research findings across a range of countries and landscapes on the valuation of Energy and Nature together. This unique support aims to transforms the way research is conducted, from the current state of production of individual paper contributions, to a much more coordinated state of production of actual knowledge around key questions. This simple concept can provide necessary glue to keep disparate international communities together, over decades.

KAPtEN will support UK leadership in the valuation of Energy and Nature together, by supporting the development the first international assessment in 10-20 key statements on this topic, and follow up, large scale deployment of a continuous assessment.

KAPtEN is novel. As early as 2003, the UN provided a 'Plan of Action' to promote the use of ICT in support of international development goals; such a plan is still discussed in high-level meetings (e.g. UNESCO 2013) but is yet to be implemented. NERC's strategy also states that NERC will 'harness the rapid development of information technology to open the record to the wider world'. The KAPtEN team brings here its extensive experience and innovation to make a step change in the development and use of ICT to produce scientific knowledge differently.

KAPtEN will inform a broad public, including policy makers, businesses, the media, and prospective science students. The continuous availability of up-to-date research knowledge in an open and transparent way could serve multiple needs for society, and could be akin to the development of Wikipedia in 2001, which now hosts nearly five million articles. No assessment exercise, on its own, can harness so openly the power of an entire research community, as KAPtEN aims to do.