Trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity conservation, land use change and ecosystem services

Author(s):  
Alexander P.E. van Oudenhoven ◽  
Rudolf S. de Groot
Forests ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzheng Li ◽  
Xiaoqin Cheng ◽  
Hairong Han

Ecosystem services (ES), defined as benefits provided by the ecosystem to society, are essential to human well-being. However, it remains unclear how they will be affected by land-use changes due to lack of knowledge and data gaps. Therefore, understanding the response mechanism of ecosystem services to land-use change is critical for developing systematic and sound land planning. In this study, we aimed to explore the impacts of land-use change on the three ecosystem services, carbon storage (CS), flood regulation (FR), and soil conservation (SC), in the ecological conservation area of Beijing, China. We first projected land-use changes from 2015 to 2030, under three scenarios, i.e., Business as Usual (BAU), Ecological Land Protection (ELP), and Rapid Economic Development (RED), by interactively integrating the Markov model (Quantitative simulation) with the GeoSOS-FLUS model (Spatial arrangement), and then quantified the three ecosystem services by using a spatially explicit InVEST model. The results showed that built-up land would have the most remarkable growth during 2015–2030 under the RED scenario (2.52% increase) at the expense of cultivated and water body, while forest land is predicted to increase by 152.38 km2 (1.36% increase) under the ELP scenario. The ELP scenario would have the highest amount of carbon storage, flood regulation, and soil conservation, due to the strict protection policy on ecological land. The RED scenario, in which a certain amount of cultivated land, water body, and forest land is converted to built-up land, promotes soil conservation but triggers greater loss of carbon storage and flood regulation capacity. The conversion between land-use types will affect trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services, in which carbon storage would show significant positive correlation with soil conservation through the period of 2015 to 2030, under all scenarios. Together, our results provide a quantitative scientific report that policymakers and land managers can use to identify and prioritize the best practices to sustain ecosystem services, by balancing the trade-offs among services.


Oryx ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ishana Thapa ◽  
Stuart H. M. Butchart ◽  
Hum Gurung ◽  
Alison J. Stattersfield ◽  
David H. L. Thomas ◽  
...  

AbstractPolicy-makers are paying increasing attention to ecosystem services, given improved understanding that they underpin human well-being, and following their integration within the Aichi Targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Decision-makers need information on trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services but tools for assessing the latter are often expensive, technically demanding and ignore the local context. In this study we used a simple, replicable participatory assessment approach to gather information on ecosystem services at important sites for biodiversity conservation in Nepal, to feed into local and national decision-making. Through engaging knowledgeable stakeholders we assessed the services delivered by Nepal's 27 Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas, the pressures affecting services through impacts on land cover and land use, and the consequences of these for people. We found that these sites provide ecosystem services to beneficiaries at a range of scales but under current pressures the balance of services will change, with local communities incurring the greatest costs. The approach provided valuable information on the trade-offs between ecosystem services and between different people, developed the capacity of civil society to engage in decision-making at the local and national level, and provided digestible information for Nepal's government. We recommend this approach in other countries where there is a lack of information on the likely impacts of land-use change on ecosystem services and people.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 3966
Author(s):  
Baoan Hu ◽  
Zhijie Zhang ◽  
Hairong Han ◽  
Zuzheng Li ◽  
Xiaoqin Cheng ◽  
...  

Ecological engineering is a widely used strategy to address environmental degradation and enhance human well-being. A quantitative assessment of the impacts of ecological engineering on ecosystem services (ESs) is a prerequisite for designing inclusive and sustainable engineering programs. In order to strengthen national ecological security, the Chinese government has implemented the world’s largest ecological project since 1999, the Grain for Green Program (GFGP). We used a professional model to evaluate the key ESs in Lvliang City. Scenario analysis was used to quantify the contribution of the GFGP to changes in ESs and the impacts of trade-offs/synergy. We used spatial regression to identify the main drivers of ES trade-offs. We found that: (1) From 2000 to 2018, the contribution rates of the GFGP to changes in carbon storage (CS), habitat quality (HQ), water yield (WY), and soil conservation (SC) were 140.92%, 155.59%, −454.48%, and 92.96%, respectively. GFGP compensated for the negative impacts of external environmental pressure on CS and HQ, and significantly improved CS, HQ, and SC, but at the expense of WY. (2) The GFGP promotes the synergistic development of CS, HQ, and SC, and also intensifies the trade-off relationships between WY and CS, WY and HQ, and WY and SC. (3) Land use change and urbanization are significantly positively correlated with the WY–CS, WY–HQ, and WY–SC trade-offs, while increases in NDVI helped alleviate these trade-offs. (4) Geographically weighted regression explained 90.8%, 94.2%, and 88.2% of the WY–CS, WY–HQ, and WY–SC trade-offs, respectively. We suggest that the ESs’ benefits from the GFGP can be maximized by controlling the intensity of land use change, optimizing the development of urbanization, and improving the effectiveness of afforestation. This general method of quantifying the impact of ecological engineering on ESs can act as a reference for future ecological restoration plans and decision-making in China and across the world.


Author(s):  
M. Neyret ◽  
M. Fischer ◽  
E. Allan ◽  
N. Hölzel ◽  
V. H. Klaus ◽  
...  

SummaryLand-use intensification has contrasting effects on different ecosystem services, often leading to land-use conflicts. Multiple studies, especially within the ‘land-sharing versus land-sparing’ debate, have demonstrated how landscape-scale strategies can minimise the trade-off between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. However, little is known about which land-use strategies maximise the landscape-level supply of multiple ecosystem services (landscape multifunctionality), a common goal of stakeholder communities. Here, we combine data collected from 150 grassland sites with a simulation approach to identify landscape compositions, with differing proportions of low-, medium-, and high-intensity grasslands, that minimise trade-offs between the four main grassland ecosystem services demanded by stakeholders: biodiversity conservation, aesthetic value, productivity and carbon storage.We show that optimisation becomes increasingly difficult as more services are considered, due to varying responses of individual services to land-use intensity and the confounding effects of other environmental drivers. Thus, our results show that simple land-use strategies cannot deliver high levels of all services, making hard choices inevitable when there are trade-offs between multiple services. However, if moderate service levels are deemed acceptable, then strategies similar to the ‘land-sparing’ approach can deliver landscape multifunctionality. Given the sensitivity of our results on these factors we provide an online tool that identifies strategies based on user-defined demand for each service (https://neyret.shinyapps.io/landscape_composition_for_multifunctionality/). Such a tool can aid informed decision making and allow for the roles of stakeholder demands and biophysical trade-offs to be understood by scientists and practitioners alike.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Pilogallo ◽  
Lucia Saganeiti ◽  
Francesco Scorza ◽  
Beniamino Murgante

<p>By the end of this century effects of land-use change on ecosystem services are expected to be more significant than other world-wide transformation processes such as climate change, altering atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or distribution of invasive alien species.</p><p>In recent years, scientific literature has been embellished with numerous land-use models that aim to explore the behaviour of land use systems under changing environmental conditions and different territorial transformations explaining the different dynamics that contribute to it, and to formulate scenario analyses to be followed up by development strategies.</p><p>In addition, it should be noted that a dimension of the nexus between planning and sustainability that is important but still too little explored, is the assessment of territorial changes and development dynamics through the alterations analysis induced on processes, functions and complex systems.</p><p>While land-use models can help investigate the effects of a combination of drivers at different scales, ecosystem services approach can help in better understand the trade-offs between different development scenarios making explicit the relations that every variation induces within the relationship between man and territory  and among different environmental components.</p><p>In this framework is set the present work that aims to integrate scenario analysis of the Basilicata region (Italy) development with assessments of alterations induced on the capacity to deliver ecosystem services. Although this region is very poorly populated and characterised by low settlement density, it is not immune to the global phenomenon of land take associated with high territorial fragmentation.</p><p>The building stock increase due to real development dynamics and relative demographic increase typical of the post-war period, was followed by a further built up environment growth - in contrast with the demographic trend - and a significant land take due to massive construction of renewable energy production plants.</p><p>Changing model have been applied to identify and classify the driving forces for land use changes and predict future development scenarios.</p><p>In order to contribute to the development of decision support systems, scenarios resulting from the implementation of different policies are analyzed with the ecosystem services approach.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziyi Wang ◽  
Yu wang ◽  
Jingxiang Zhang ◽  
Dongqi Sun ◽  
Zihang Zhou

AbstractLand Use/Land Cover Change (LUCC) is one of the important reasons for the change of ecosystem services (ESs). Due to the uncertainty of future development policies and the complexity of LUCC, assessing the impact of future urban sprawl on ecosystem services remains challenging. We simulated the effect of urban land-use change on ESs on the basis of different functional scenarios, which is of important value to urban land-use planning and ESs protection. In our study, we designed three scenarios: Production function priority scenario (PFP scenario)、 Living function priority scenario (LFP scenario)、 Ecological function priority scenario (EFP Scenario). And we used the GeoSOS-FLUS software to realize visualization. Based on invest model, we evaluated five types of ESs: carbon storage, warter yield, habitat quality, water purification and soil conservation. Research showed that from 2000 to 2015, carbon storage, habitat quality and water production in Nanjing decreased significantly, soil conservation increased slightly, and the performance of the two indicators for water purification was not consistent. From different scenarios, carbon storage and habitat quality were the highest in EFP scenario, water yield was the highest in PFP scenario and soil conservation was the highest in LFP scenario. We analyzed the trade-offs among various ESs, found that the change of land-use types in cities does not fundamentally change the trade-offs among various ESs. We believed that the determination of the main function of LUCC was the first condition to judge the applicability of scenario, and the scenario simulation which integrated the main function of the city could provide more references for the related research.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrique M. Pereira ◽  
Isabel M.D. Rosa ◽  
Inês S. Martins ◽  
HyeJin Kim ◽  
Paul Leadley ◽  
...  

AbstractDespite the scientific consensus on the extinction crisis and its anthropogenic origin, the quantification of historical trends and of future scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services has been limited, due to the lack of inter-model comparisons and harmonized scenarios. Here, we present a multi-model analysis to assess the impacts of land-use and climate change from 1900 to 2050. During the 20th century provisioning services increased, but biodiversity and regulating services decreased. Similar trade-offs are projected for the coming decades, but they may be attenuated in a sustainability scenario. Future biodiversity loss from land-use change is projected to keep up with historical rates or reduce slightly, whereas losses due to climate change are projected to increase greatly. Renewed efforts are needed by governments to meet the 2050 vision of the Convention on Biological Diversity.One Sentence SummaryDevelopment pathways exist that allow for a reduction of the rates of biodiversity loss from land-use change and improvement in regulating services but climate change poses an increasing challenge.


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