The magnitude and pace of global change demand rapid assessment of nature and its contributions to people. We present a fine-scale global modeling of current status and future scenarios for several contributions: water quality regulation, coastal risk reduction, and crop pollination. We find that where people’s needs for nature are now greatest, nature’s ability to meet those needs is declining. Up to 5 billion people face higher water pollution and insufficient pollination for nutrition under future scenarios of land use and climate change, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Hundreds of millions of people face heightened coastal risk across Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas. Continued loss of nature poses severe threats, yet these can be reduced 3- to 10-fold under a sustainable development scenario.
Resource managers increasingly seek to implement cost-effective watershed restoration plans for multiple ecosystem service benefits. Using locally adapted ecosystem service tools and historical management costs, we quantified spatially explicit management costs and benefits (in terms of groundwater recharge and landscape flammability) to assist a state agency in evaluating cobenefits for a predefined restoration scenario (focused on biodiversity benefits) and to prioritize an expanded restoration scenario in the state-managed Pu'u Wa'awa'a watershed (Hawai'i) now and under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 midcentury climate scenario. Restoring all available areas increases recharge by ~1.74 million m 3 /yr (5% of recharge over the entire watershed) under the current climate and does not meaningfully change recharge under RCP 8.5 midcentury, whereas climate change decreases recharge by ~50%. For landscape flammability, climate change increases the median and maximum probability of fire occurrence across all land use scenarios, and full restoration results in the greatest reduction in landscape flammability under both current and RCP 8.5 midcentury climate scenarios. We demonstrate that location and type of forest restoration influence overall cost-effectiveness of restoration, providing insights for landscape planning for ecosystem services under a limited budget. Across all scenarios, capturing potential benefits at low elevations requires greater expenditures ($13,161/ ha) than at high elevations ($5,501/ ha) due mainly to the substantial costs of removing Pennisetum setaceum (fountain grass), the dominant land cover below 1,000 m. If management focuses on groundwater recharge only, the most cost-effective areas occur at high elevations (>1,000 m), with ample fog interception, although recharge benefits decline across the landscape under RCP 8.5 midcentury. Focusing instead on cost-effective landscape flammability reduction as the primary management objective shifts emphasis toward dry low-elevation areas under the current climate. However, under the RCP 8.5 midcentury scenario, the most cost-effective areas for flammability management shift toward higher elevations with greater potential overlap with recharge benefits.
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