Negotiating Indigenous benefits from payment for ecosystem service (PES) schemes

This paper draws on research conducted with Aboriginal land managers across Northern Australia to show how and why payments for ecosystem service (PES) schemes should be framed around Indigenous rights to and relationships with their traditional estates. PES schemes offer opportunities to recognize and support Aboriginal communities' land and sea management knowledge and practices, and there is strong evidence that Indigenous communities are seeking to engage with such schemes. We focus on Aboriginal savanna landscape management, particularly traditional burning practices, to extend the ecosystem services framework to recognize Indigenous values and interactions with their lands as a critical service for Indigenous well-being. Drawing on case-study analysis of PES projects negotiated to support Aboriginal fire management programs across Northern Australia, we show how cultural ecosystem services can be applied to represent the active, dynamic and often interdependent relationships inherent in Indigenous human-environment relationships.     

The challenge of valuing ecosystem services that have no material benefits

Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecosystem service science has made much progress in framing core concepts and approaches, but there is still debate around the notion of cultural services, and a growing consensus that ecosystem use and ecosystem service use should be clearly differentiated. Part of the debate resides in the fact that the most significant sources of conflict around natural resource management arise from the multiple managements (uses) of ecosystems, rather than from the multiple uses of ecosystem services.If the ecosystem approach or the ecosystem service paradigm are to be implemented at national levels, there is an urgent need to disentangle what are often semantic issues, revise the notion of cultural services, and more broadly, practically define the less tangible ecosystem services on which we depend. This is a critical step to identifying suitable ways to manage trade-offs and promote adaptive management.Here we briefly review the problems associated with defining and quantifying cultural ecosystem services and suggest there could be merit in discarding this term for the simpler non-material ecosystem services. We also discuss the challenges in valuing the invaluable, and suggest that if we are to keep ecosystem service definition focused on the beneficiary, we need to further classify these challenging services, for example by differentiating services to individuals from services to communities. Also, we suggest that focussing on ecosystem service change rather than simply service delivery, and identifying common boundaries relevant for both people and ecosystems, would help meet some of these challenges.     

Assisted tree migration can reduce but not avert the decline of forest ecosystem services in Europe

European forests are facing multiple natural and anthropogenic pressures that are expected to become more severe in the next decades. Tree diversity is projected to decline in many areas across the continent. How this will affect the provision of forest services remains an open question, whose answer depends, among others, on the practical and theoretical challenges of incorporating assisted migration into climate adaptation strategies. Here, we tackle the issue by combining a large dataset of tree species occurrences, future climatic projections, and data on tree functional traits and tree-specific forest services into a novel modelling framework. We estimate that, by the end of the century and under a natural dispersal scenario, the provision of forest services would decrease on average by 15% in Europe (for RCP 4.5; 23% for RCP 8.5), and up to 52% (70% for RCP 8.5) in the Mediterranean. To explore if and how management could reduce the projected losses, we simulated a suite of alternative assisted migration strategies aimed at identifying, for each locality, the tree species communities offering the best compromise in terms of resilience to climate change and delivery of specific combinations of ecosystem services. Such strategies could reduce losses of services by 10% (15%) on average in Europe, and even increase service availability in the Alpine and Boreal regions but not in the Mediterranean, where losses will remain as high as 33% (54% for RCP 8.5). Our findings highlight how science-driven management strategies could be vital to reduce an otherwise dramatic, European-wide decline of forest services. Our results are qualitatively robust to different assumptions on future carbon emissions and related climate trajectories. That is, our simulated assisted migration strategies identify similar tree species communities under different pathways (RCP 4.5 vs RCP 8.5). This makes our approach a powerful tool for forest management, as it generates advice that is valid regardless of whether, and to what extent, human society will steer away from business-as-usual emission trajectories.     

Mapping the diversity of regulating ecosystem services in European cities

This paper presents the first analysis of the diversity of regulating ecosystem services (ESS)—key variables for global environmental sustainability and change in an urban era—across a globally important part of the urban world, urban Europe. We map the first pan-European pattern of regulating ecosystem services in urban core areas and their associated hinterlands and discuss data against the background of each city's land-use development history and planning culture. Upon selecting more than 300 cities, we used the Urban Atlas database and a straightforward calculation method to map three regulating ecosystem services. The main results of this study show (a) a heterogeneous distribution of regulating ecosystem services across European cities, (b) considerable provisioning differences between core cities and the hinterland, (c) a grouping of European regions according to their potential for urban ecosystem service provisioning and (d) an ecosystem services supply ranking for European cities. Considerable differences in urban ecosystem services were found among northern countries, such as Sweden and Finland, which are rich in supplying ecosystem services compared to the UK and Belgium, which, similar to Spanish and Greek cities, are characteristically low in ecosystem services provision. Our results provide the first overall picture of regulating services in urban EU-Europe and serve to inform decisions on the key aspects of future European policy and strategies involving urban nature, green spaces and health.     

溱湖湿地生态系统服务价值评估研究

利用实地调研结果,结合相关文献资料,采用市场价值法、影子工程法、旅行费用法等评估方法,对溱湖湿地生态系统的物质生产、涵养水源和调蓄洪水、提供动植物栖息地、调节气候、降解污染物和科考旅游等6个效益最为突出的生态系统服务功能经济价值指标进行评估。研究表明：溱湖湿地生态系统的总价值为1.15×109元,其中直接使用价值为7.708×108元,间接使用价值为3.62×108元,非使用价值为0.18×108元。其中科考旅游价值所占比重最大,为40.84％,调节气候价值次之,而生物多样性保护价值仅占1.45%。对溱湖湿地生态系统服务功能及服务价值的探讨,可正确认识该生态系统的生态经济价值,为合理开发利用提供决策参考,确保其资源的可持续利用。     

Economic and ecosystem costs and benefits of alternative land use and management scenarios in the Lake Rotorua,New Zealand,catchment

A significant challenge in resource management is addressed: the perceived trade-off between economic growth and ecosystem restoration and conservation. Traditional approaches to management regard restoration as a potential cost to economic productivity. In this study we show that by considering a broader range of economic values, including ecosystem services values, an argument can be made that restoration of lake ecosystems also leads to favourable economic outcomes when commonly disregarded values are considered. Our case study analyses the ecological outcomes of different catchment mitigation and land use scenarios in terms of water quality results in a lake, assessing changes in land use values based on opportunity costs, and ecosystem services values. We show that when considering the value of ecosystem services, intensive agricultural land use is not necessarily the most economically valuable form of land use within a lake catchment. Indeed, a shift towards alternative land uses within a catchment can lead to both ongoing economic benefits and improvements in water quality. In this context, land-use change offers an option for water quality improvement that minimises lake and land mitigation costs, while adding value to catchment land use. An argument is made supporting land use change towards indigenous forest types, which can sustain alternative sources of income such as a range of recreational values, while supporting important ecosystem functions for the region.     

克拉玛依减排林区土地开发的效应

基于克拉玛依减排林区的土壤和地下水取样分析结果,应用生态系统服务价值的原理与方法,分析了克拉玛依减排林区的土地开发效应.结果表明土地开发已取得一定的正效应:已开发用地土壤有机质、有效N和速效K的质量分数均高于未开发用地,土地开发明显地改善了土壤的养分状况;土壤浅层总盐量降低67.5%,土壤盐渍化现象得到有效控制;林地生态系统服务价值高达1.5417×10⁹元/a.同时,土地开发也产生了一些负效应:地下水pH值、电导率、矿化度和全盐量均高于未开发用地,减排林区地下水化学特征不利于区域减排林效应的持续发挥;土壤有效P质量分数偏低,也不利于林区植被的生长.     

Novel insights on intensity and typology of direct human-nature interactions in protected areas through passive crowdsourcing

Recent advances in geotagging, sharing and automatically analyzing online content from Social Networking Sites (SNS) offer unprecedented opportunities for the analysis of human-nature interactions. Previous studies in this field, however, offer limited insights regarding the benefits of automated content analysis especially at large scales, biases arising from the selection of SNS sources, and the predictive power of visitation models based on SNS data. We explore quantitative and qualitative aspects related to intensity, interests and sentiments associated with on-site experiences in 568 protected areas in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. We analyze counts and content of >100,000 photographs and tweets from four different SNSs, calibrate visitation models and predict visitation in unmonitored sites, cluster sites based on the typology of human-nature interactions reflected in online photographs, and characterize the polarity of sentiments associated with experiences in individual sites and clusters thereof. We find benefits in combining data from multiple sources and controlling for biases related to sites’ photogenicity and type of human-nature interactions. Our results suggest that current best estimates of visitation in unmonitored sites underestimate by 39% the actual number of visits. We discuss how the techniques and findings in this study are applicable in the broader context of the management and conservation of sites of environmental or cultural interest.     

The importance of deliberation in valuing ecosystem services in developing countries—Evidence from the Solomon Islands

Monetary valuation of ecosystem services enables more accurate accounting of the environmental costs and benefits of policies, but this has rarely been applied in developing countries. In such contexts, there are particular methodological and epistemological challenges that require novel valuation methodologies. This paper introduces a new participatory, deliberative choice experiment approach conducted in the Solomon Islands. The research aimed to determine the value people placed on ecosystem services and whether participatory interventions to elicit deeper held values influenced the preferences expressed. Results found that the initial willingness to pay for a number of tropical forest ecosystem services amounted to 30% of household income. Following deliberative intervention exercises, key ecosystem services effectively became priceless as participants were unwilling to trade them off in the choice experiment scenarios, regardless of financial cost. The group based deliberative approach, combined with participatory interventions, also resulted in significant learning for participants. This included a more sophisticated view of ecological-cultural linkages, greater recognition of deeper held values, and greater awareness of the consequences of human actions for the environment. The use of a group-based participatory approach instead of a conventional individual survey helped to overcome many of the practical difficulties associated with valuation in developing countries. Given the impact of learning on valuation outcomes, participation and deliberation should be integrated into valuation of any complex good, both in developing and developed economies. However, such a methodology raises questions about how valuation can deal with unwillingness to trade-off key ecosystem services, which results in the breakdown of monetary valuation methods. Evaluation of the appropriateness of valuation processes and methodologies for assessing deeper held values and use of mixed-method approaches will be essential to ensure policies take into account the extent to which human life is dependent on ecosystem services.     

Cost-benefit analysis in the context of ecosystem services for human well-being: A multidisciplinary critique

This paper provides a critique of the cost-benefit analysis tool for ecosystem services policy evaluation. We argue that when applied to public ecosystem services, the theoretical assumptions that underlie economic valuation and cost-benefit analysis fail to fully acknowledge the multiple dimensions of human well-being, the plural forms of value articulation, the complex nature of ecosystems, the distributional biases of markets and the fairness implications of spatio-temporal framing. The current monistic utilitarian approach to ecosystem services policy evaluation should therefore be replaced by a pluralist framework composed of a heterogeneous set of value-articulating instruments that are appropriate to the specific context within which decision-making takes place. It is argued that within this pluralist framework cost-benefit analysis may remain an appropriate tool to examine the contingent trade-offs of local policies that have limited impacts on ecosystems and their services.