Creative Ecosystem Services: Valuing Benefits of Innovative Cultural Networks

The Ecosystem Services provided by food encompass a vast amount of material and immaterial benefits to human beings and shared values linked to creativity, self-fulfilment, recreation, sociality, culture, and mutual learning, which are at the basis of a modern and eco-instructed community. In Italy, agri-food no-profit sector or small-medium enterprises can empower a community to cope with resource depletion, waste production, biodiversity loss, and climate change by sparking sustainable urban and rural practices preserving the current ecosystem services and generating new ones. Within the ecological economics, the integrated assessments’ contribution becomes relevant when the potentials of sustainable agri-food practices and values – which local communities assign to the related Ecosystem Services – have to be estimated to better inform Decision Makers in empowering policy and planning fostering maintenance and regulation of these services in rural and urban contexts. The contribution's purpose was to propose a methodological approach for assessing creative ecosystem services within an agri-food cultural value chain with the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) multi-criteria method. The overall results have allowed obtaining a global ranking of the preferable scenarios linked to a Cultural Creative Enterprise (CCE) located in Foggia, Apulia (Italy). The research follow-up addresses the co-creation of creative ecosystem services in synergy with local stakeholders and beneficiaries, generating new job opportunities, awareness and innovation through an advanced form of shared responsibility.