Incorporating climate change into ecosystem service assessments and decisions: a review

Abstract

Climate change is having a significant impact on ecosystem services and is likely to become increasingly important as this phenomenon intensifies. Future impacts can be difficult to assess as they often involve long timescales, dynamic systems with high uncertainties, and are typically confounded by other drivers of change. Despite a growing literature on climate change impacts on ecosystem services, no quantitative syntheses exist. Hence, we lack an overarching understanding of the impacts of climate change, how they are being assessed, and the extent to which other drivers, uncertainties, and decision making are incorporated. To address this, we systematically reviewed the peer-reviewed literature that assesses climate change impacts on ecosystem services at subglobal scales. We found that the impact of climate change on most types of services was predominantly negative (59% negative, 24% mixed, 4% neutral, 13% positive), but varied across services, drivers, and assessment methods. Although uncertainty was usually incorporated, there were substantial gaps in the sources of uncertainty included, along with the methods used to incorporate them. We found that relatively few studies integrated decision making, and even fewer studies aimed to identify solutions that were robust to uncertainty. For management or policy to ensure the delivery of ecosystem services, integrated approaches that incorporate multiple drivers of change and account for multiple sources of uncertainty are needed. This is undoubtedly a challenging task, but ignoring these complexities can result in misleading assessments of the impacts of climate change, suboptimal management outcomes, and the inefficient allocation of resources for climate adaptation.

Introductory Chapter: Land Use Change Ecosystem Services and Tropical Forests

“…Land use change in the tropics is caused mainly for agricultural use [9]. Land use change will affect ecosystem services, and climate change makes this a more complicated but emergent problem for human beings [10]. Many land use practices still widely extended in tropical forests (e.g., fuel-wood collection, forest grazing, and road expansion) can degrade forest ecosystem conditions-in terms of productivity, biomass, stand structure, and species composition-even without changing forest area.…”

Planning for the conservation and management of ecosystem services in Central Chile

“…This popularity has led to significant progress in quantifying, mapping and modeling the provision of ecosystem services (Seppelt et al 2011, Martínez-Harms and Balvanera 2012, Boerema et al 2016. Much of this work has been purportedly directed toward improving environmental decision-making (Bennett et al 2015, Martinez-Harms et al 2015, Runting et al 2016. Indeed, the concept has clarified the multiple benefits humans derive from ecosystems, evaluating and quantifying these benefits, and identifying how these might be factored into land-use management decisions.…”

“…These have included the lack of a robust theory linking biodiversity to ecosystem services ; poor quantification of ecosystem services without distinguishing between capacity of ecosystems to provide services, demand for services, and flow of services to people (Boerema et al 2016); quantification that is still based on static analyses, ignoring uncertainty and feedbacks between ecosystem services and drivers of change (Nicholson et al 2009, Runting et al 2016; lack of empirical data to assess services especially with adequate historical records (De Groot et al 2010); tendency to overlook the role of landscape configuration in providing ecosystem services (Mitchell et al 2015), and the limited understanding of the role of policies, trade, technology, and other human actions on the provision of ecosystem services ).…”

“…Much of the uptake of ecosystem services in science and policy is based on the belief that ecosystem services can lead to better environmental decision-making (Bennett et al 2015, MartinezHarms et al 2015, Runting et al 2016) by improving understanding of trade-offs between management alternatives and helping assess impacts of decisions on changes in ecosystem services provision , Maes et al 2012, Bateman et al 2013, Arkema et al 2015, Bennett et al 2015. Nonetheless, the integration of ecosystem services into decision-making remains challenging and has yet to change land-use decisions fundamentally.…”

“…There has been a paucity of studies of ecosystem services assessments under global change [but see (Oteros-Rozas et al 2015)], particularly in developing countries of Latin America (Runting et al 2016). The exact nature of global change impacts in these countries is largely unknown and adaptive capacity is expected to be low (Sinivasan 2010).…”