Assessing tradeoffs among ecosystem services across spatial scales and social contexts

Background/Question/Methods

Achieving sustainability – meeting the needs of current populations without compromising the needs of future generations – is the major challenge facing global society in the 21st century. Navigating the inherent trade-offs between ecosystem services within and across social contexts and scales is critical for sustainable resource management, and will define outcomes for human well-being across the globe, both for current and future generations. Drawing from our interdisciplinary experiences in the ecological, economics and social sciences we collated an analytical framework for explicitly depicting tradeoffs within socio-ecological systems and assessing system-wide sustainability. We illustrate the approach with examples from a variety of study systems in the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Kenya. We emphasize the challenges of achieving sustainable development in the Global South where global benefits of biodiversity supplied by tropical countries are often in conflict with local needs in those same countries for provisioning ecosystem service provisions. 

Results/Conclusions

The framework starts by exploring the ecological mechanisms that underpin ecosystem services and assess how these lead to biophysical trade-offs among services. We then shows how thresholds and non-linear dynamics make trade-offs among ecosystem services inherently difficult to navigate and manage. We further assess differing preferences and values of different stakeholders in the face of the above. Next, its explores how impediments and enabling factors to achieving efficient and sustainable ecosystem service outcomes emerge from a range of institutional and cultural factors and shift across scales within and across political borders. Finally it shows how temporal dynamics of biophysical constraints and ecosystem services can result in temporal lags and intergenerational inequities. We discuss how this framework can assist collective management efforts to navigate conflicts and help guide resource management toward more sustainable and equitable outcomes. The utility of the framework is both pedagogical and practical; the process of identifying and expressing the key variables to include permits explicit illustration of conflicts between stakeholders in the system and identification of win-win situations. We discuss how the different perspectives of the team members helped visualize the role of contrasting preferences, contexts and scales and contributed to building this framework.