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Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the world's most biodiverse regions, but this diversity is threatened by the overexploitation of natural resources and internal social conflicts. In 2018, 33 LAC countries were invited to sign and ratify the landmark Escazú Agreement, which is the first legally binding environmental agreement to explicitly integrate human rights with environmental matters. The agreement outlines an approach to enhance the protection of environmental defenders, increase public participation in environmental decision‐making, and foster cooperation among countries for biodiversity conservation. However, clear mechanisms to implement the ideals of the Agreement are currently lacking. We identify the key provisions of the Agreement and link these to tangible mechanisms which aim to integrate human rights and nature conservation. These mechanisms include technological (e.g., free online data), human‐based (e.g., legal advice from multidisciplinary teams), and nature‐based solutions (e.g., transboundary species management). As environmental assets––and threats to them––span national boundaries, the collaborative and participatory provisions of the agreement could catalyze coordinated transboundary environmental management. Because of the importance of this Agreement for the LAC region, we added a Spanish version of this manuscript in the Supplementary Material (versión del artículo en español en el material suplementario).

The provision of ecosystem services is inherently spatial. Landscape structure affects service provision through multiple landscape-level processes, such as fragmentation, edge and connectivity effects. These processes can affect areas of ecosystem service supply and demand, and the flows linking those areas. Despite the emergence of sophisticated spatial ecosystem service assessments in the last two decades, we show through a literature review that landscape-level processes are still rarely considered in a comprehensive way. Even when they are considered, landscape effects are mostly limited to landscape composition, and configuration effects are underrepresented. Furthermore, most studies infer ecosystem service provision by only evaluating supply, ignoring demand and flows. Here we present a simple conceptual framework that illustrates how to incorporate landscape-level processes in the assessment of the different components of the service provision chain (supply, demand and flows). Using simulations, we evaluated how estimations of ecosystem service provision change when considering different landscape processes and discussed the implications of disregarding landscape effects. However, to fully implement the framework, a series of challenges linked to mapping and quantifying supply and demand, defining adequate scales of analysis, measuring flows, and parameterizing models for different types of services, still need to be overcome. To promote an adequate use and management of ecosystem services, it is essential to better incorporate landscape processes in ecosystem service assessments. This will lead to more quantitatively accurate and spatially precise estimates.

Abstract With a global pollinator crisis brewing, it is urgent that we preserve forests supporting wild bees and the services they provide, even in context where agricultural expansion is unavoidable. Though the maintenance of pollination services are known to be synergistic with biodiversity conservation and agricultural economic development, there are few decision support tools that explicitly show how to balance these competing objectives. We developed a novel, spatially explicit method that includes pollination supply, flow, demand, and benefits into an agricultural expansion context to improve land use decisions for agricultural outcomes that minimize environmental impacts. We provide the first study showing the trade-offs between yields and forest retention that uses all the components of pollination services across five planning scenarios (i.e. (a) baseline, (b) absence of pollinators, (c) pollinators present, (d) pollination and non-aggregated forest, (e) pollination and aggregated forest) using data on coffee from Costa Rica. The scenario that showed the highest trade-offs was when pollination services are considered unimportant, which led to a decrease on average yields (∼−23% compared to baseline), whilst also decimating remaining forest (−100% compared to baseline). Better forest retention was achieved in a scenario where pollination services were considered and more forest aggregation was required. In this case, total production incremented by ∼29% while ∼74% of forest patches were preserved. The flexibility of our framework allows adaptation to any crop that benefit from pollination services in different landscape contexts.

Carbon dioxide (CO) has been increasing homogeneously worldwide since industrial revolution. Current CO concentrations are around 400 ppm, which may increase over this century to 430 ppm (best scenario) to > 1000 ppm (worst scenario) (IPCC, 2013). Species-level responses of plant traits to elevated carbon dioxide (eCO), especially those that affect interactions with pollinators, could potentially have flow-on effects to both ecological communities and horticultural industries. The impacts of eCO on flowering traits in pepper (Capsicum annuum - Giant Bell), tomato (Lycopersicon lycopersicum- var. Tomato Roma) and zucchini (Cucurbita pepo - Zucchini Blackjack), all economically important horticultural species, were investigated. Twenty plants of each species were grown under two treatments: 1) two glasshouses with ambient CO (400 ppm), and 2) two with eCO (555 ppm). For both treatments, we measured the number of flowers, flower longevity and dry biomass for all species; pollen diameter and number of pollen grains for tomato and zucchini and the sucrose concentration and nectar production in zucchini. Elevated CO had few significant effects on the measured traits, the main exceptions being in zucchini, which produced more male flowers, fewer pollen grains per plant and fewer female flowers under this treatment. Pepper also produced fewer flowers at eCO while tomato was the least sensitive species. Future studies could be aimed at testing sensitivity of different varieties of these important commercial species to eCO.