Blind spots in ecosystem services research and challenges for implementation

Analyzing Spatial Congruencies and Mismatches between Supply, Demand and Flow of Ecosystem Services and Sustainable Development

“…Our results from the overlap analyses, therefore, provide valuable information for decision-making from the local to the trans-national level. Although strengthening ESs aims to improve human well-being, the benefits often remain unclear or unaddressed in ES assessments [20,31]. Hence, not only is a better alignment of ESs with SDGs needed [13,18,19], but also an enhancement of ES assessments is necessary to better represent the human dimension, and to include norms of sustainability.…”

“…These results suggest that ESs and sustainability may be related, but there exist considerable imbalances between rather rural or urban municipalities, which becomes apparent in the differences in overlap and in the distinctions between supply, demand and flow. By focusing only on ES supply or even ES potential, as done by most of the ES assessments [31], our results indicate that the environmental dimension of sustainability may be well presented, but the social and economic dimensions have been widely neglected. Moreover, a high provision of ESs does not always imply the use of the environment in a sustainable manner (i.e., fodder or timber production may be maximized using unsustainable measures [47,70], or a high recreational use may have negative impacts on ecosystems [71]).…”

“…These include enhancing indicators based on ecological functions and processes to evaluate the consequences of management choices or changes in the demand for ESs [28][29][30]. This requires a comprehensive view on supply, demand and flow to assess spatial interactions and trade-offs [31,32], as several studies have emphasized that spatial mismatches between demand and supply occur at various scales [4,5,[33][34][35]. Consequently, goods and services may need to be transported to beneficiaries, or people need to move to supply areas (e.g., to benefit from recreational opportunities) [4,36,37].…”

Operationalising ecosystem services in Europe

“…Setting objectives for ES provision is often not straightforward, since the relationships between how much of a service is provided and the value it has for society are often non-linear (e.g. minimum levels needed to realise a benefit), location-dependent (pollination near crops, air purification near urban areas) and context-dependent (Lautenbach et al 2019). Improvements are often possible compared to the current level of ES provision and business-as-usual scenarios.…”

“…1. Review and synthesise knowledge gaps, user needs and best practices (Lautenbach et al 2019;Patenaude et al 2019) 2. Increase knowledge and understanding to support policy and decision-making (Lee et al 2019a;Liski et al 2019a) 3.…”