SYMP 21-3
Mitigating impacts on ecosystem services through applied assessment: Lessons from WWF and the Natural Capital Project
Over the past 20 years, ecosystem service assessments have become more common in the ecology community. Unfortunately, many of these assessments never make it into the hands of decision-makers to mitigate impacts on ecosystems that affect human well-being. Many of those that do fail to inform policy and management decisions, despite their quality and relevance. What elements are necessary in ecosystem service assessments to integrate them into decision-making? What factors in decision-making affect the likelihood that these assessments will be taken up? What is standard and what varies across diverse decision-makers and decision contexts? Over the past four years, we have conducted decision-relevant ecosystem service assessments with InVEST and studied the factors that influence their uptake into decisions to mitigate or avoid impacts. Through participatory research, decision analysis, and formative evaluation, we assessed (i) enabling conditions for ecosystem services analysis to influence decisions, (ii) the functional elements of the science-policy process for ecosystem service impact mitigation, and (iii) the ways that diverse audiences use ecosystem service knowledge.
Results/Conclusions
We found several factors that enable uptake of ecosystem service assessments in policy and management decisions: a clear decision question that ecosystem service information can inform, a decision-making window that matches the timeframe for ecological assessment, the presence of a local champion, available tools and data of an appropriate scale and resolution, and ongoing coordination among scientists and decision-makers. We identified generic steps of a science-policy process that embeds ecosystem service assessment results in decisions, based on over a dozen InVEST applications around the globe in diverse decision contexts. These standard steps are (1) define roles and objectives, (2) collect and compile data, (3) generate baseline and scenarios, (4) assess outcomes, (5) synthesize results, (6) iterate and build capacity, and (7) interpret and communicate knowledge. Last, we found that ecosystem service knowledge is used in a few key ways by different parties over the course of a science-policy process. Although problem-solving was one use, we found that ecosystem service knowledge was also often used (beneficially) to advocate for change and build a common understanding.