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The ecosystem service (ES) community aspires to illuminate how nature contributes to human well-being, and thereby elevate consideration of nature in decision making. So far, however, policy impact of ES research has been limited. To understand why, we identify five key elements of ES research that help inform decisions by connecting the supply of ES to those who benefit from them. Our structured review of the ES literature reveals that only 13% of assessments included the full ES chain from place to value. Only 7% of assessments considered the distribution of ES benefits explicitly across demographic or other beneficiary groups (for example, private landowners versus the broader public), although disaggregation across regions or spatial units was more common (44%). Finally, crucial mediating factors that affect who benefits and how (for example, the vulnerability of beneficiaries or the availability of substitutes for ES) were considered in only 35% of assessments. Our results suggest that increasing the decision relevance of ES research requires more effectively predicting the impacts of specific decisions on the value and distribution of ES across beneficiary groups. Such efforts will need to integrate ecological models with socioeconomic and cultural dimensions of ES more closely than does the current ES literature. To increase the policy relevance of ecosystem service benefits research, studies need to better predict the impact of specific decisions, according to an analysis of the literature.

The future of nature's contributions A recent Global Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has emphasized the urgent need to determine where and how nature's contribution matters most to people. Chaplin-Kramer et al. have developed a globalscale modeling of ecosystem services, focusing on water quality regulation, coastal protection, and crop pollination (see the Perspective by Balvanera). By 2050, up to 5 billion people may be at risk from diminishing ecosystem services, particularly in Africa and South Asia. Science , this issue p. 255 ; see also p. 184

Irrigated agriculture has grown rapidly over the last 50 years, helping food production keep pace with population growth, but also leading to significant habitat and biodiversity loss globally. Now, in some regions, land degradation and overtaxed water resources mean historical production levels may need to be reduced. We demonstrate how analytically supported planning for habitat restoration in stressed agricultural landscapes can recover biodiversity and create co-benefits during transitions to sustainability. We apply our approach in California’s San Joaquin Valley where groundwater regulations are driving significant land use change. We link agricultural-economic and land use change models to generate plausible landscapes with different cropping patterns, including temporary fallowing and permanent retirement. We find that a large fraction of the reduced cultivation is met through temporary fallowing, but still estimate over 86,000 hectares of permanent retirement. We then apply systematic conservation planning to identify optimized restoration solutions that secure at least 10,000 hectares of high quality habitat for each of five representative endangered species, accounting for spatially varying opportunity costs specific to each plausible future landscape. The analyses identified consolidated areas common to all land use scenarios where restoration could be targeted to enhance habitat by utilizing land likely to be retired anyway, and by shifting some retirement from regions with low habitat value to regions with high habitat value. We also show potential co-benefits of retirement (derived from avoided nitrogen loadings and soil carbon sequestration), though these require careful consideration of additionality. Our approach provides a generalizable means to inform multi-benefit adaptation planning in response to agricultural stressors.

Watersheds are under increasing pressure worldwide, as expanding human activities coupled with global climate change threaten the water security of people downstream. In response, some communities have initiated investments in watershed services (IWS), a general term for policy-finance mechanisms that mitigate diverse watershed threats and promote ecosystem-based adaptation. Here, we explore the potential for increasing the uptake and impact of IWS, evaluating what limits its application and how institutional, financial, and informational barriers can be overcome. Our analysis complements the growing literature on individual programs by identifying levers at regional and global scales. We conclude that mainstreaming IWS as a cost-effective strategy alongside engineered approaches will require advances that (i) lower institutional barriers to implementation and participation in IWS; (ii) introduce structural market changes and standards of practice that account for the value of watersheds’ natural capital; (iii) develop practical tools and metrics of IWS costs and benefits; and (iv) share success stories of replicable institutional and financial models applied in varied contexts.

We analyze the impacts of investments in sustainable land use practices on ecosystem services in the Upper Tana basin, Kenya. This work supports implementation of the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund, a public-private partnership to safeguard ecosystem service provision and food security. We apply an integrated modelling framework, building on local knowledge and previous field- and model-based studies, to link biophysical landscape changes at high temporal and spatial resolution to economic benefits for key actors in the basin. The primary contribution of this study is that it a) presents a comprehensive analysis for targeting interventions that takes into account stakeholder preferences, local environmental and socio-economic conditions, b) relies on detailed, process-based, biophysical models to demonstrate the biophysical return on those investments for a practical, decision-driven case, and c) in close collaboration with downstream water users, links those biophysical outputs to monetary metrics, including: reduced water treatment costs, increased hydropower production, and crop yield benefits for agricultural producers in the conservation area. This study highlights the benefits and trade-offs that come with conducting participatory research as part of a stakeholder engagement process: while results are more likely to be decision-relevant within the local context, navigating stakeholder expectations and data limitations present ongoing challenges.

Governments and financial institutions increasingly require that environmental impact assessment and mitigation account for consequences to both biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here we present a new software tool, OPAL (Offset Portfolio Analyzer and Locator), which maps and quantifies the impacts of development on habitat and ecosystem services, and facilitates the selection of mitigation activities to offset losses. We demonstrate its application with an oil and gas extraction facility in Colombia. OPAL is the first tool to provide direct consideration of the distribution of ecosystem service benefits among people in a mitigation context. Previous biodiversity-focused efforts led to redistribution or loss of ecosystem services with environmental justice implications. Joint consideration of biodiversity and ecosystem services enables targeting of offsets to benefit both nature and society. OPAL reduces the time and technical expertise required for these analyses and has the flexibility to be used across a range of geographic and policy contexts.

In many countries, hydropower development is rapidly becoming a focus of green growth policies. This represents a significant opportunity for ecosystem services-based land management that integrates environmental and development goals to benefit the hydropower sector and support economic growth. In this study, we present an approach for targeting ecosystem-provision investment in hydropower catchments coupled with hydrologic modeling to quantify the benefits of soil and water conservation activities. We demonstrate the application of this approach in five hydropower facility catchments in the state of Himachal Pradesh, India. The results show that there is a high potential for targeted soil and water conservation to increase sediment retention services that benefit hydropower facilities (up to a 44% reduction in sediment transported from uplands into streams), although this benefit is distributed non-uniformly across catchments and levels of investment. The extent to which services can be improved is strongly driven by current land use and management practices that impact how and where conservation activities can be located. Iterative use of the method described here, in a process of stakeholder engagement and capacity-building, enables policy makers to determine the optimal mix of land management strategies and budget allocation to maximize service improvements that support hydropower production.

Water funds seek to promote long-term watershed conservation with multiple benefits for biodiversity and human well-being. This approach has grown rapidly, particularly in Latin America where more than 30 water funds were in operation or development by 2014. To meet the need for evidence to guide ongoing decisions, we assessed the goals and strategies of 16 programs that were operating in 2013–2014 in association with the Latin American Water Funds Partnership. Our findings underscore the diversity within this approach to investment in watershed services. The various financial, governance, and management mechanisms adopted by these programs reflected their distinct biophysical, socio-economic, and political contexts. All 16 water funds aimed to secure water quality (15/16) and/or quantity (including the timing of flows) (14/16). The majority of programs also explicitly strived for co-benefits to local livelihoods (9/16) and biodiversity (11/16). Public funding secured through legislation provided the most funding to date, but private, NGO, and development bank source were also important for some programs. While programs have actively engaged rural land stewards, this stakeholder group was represented on governance boards in just 4 of 16 funds. Additionally, while the majority of water funds with activities on the ground (13/16) reported biophysical and social impact monitoring (8/16), many faced significant logistical, technical, and funding challenges to its implementation. We recommend greater inclusion of rural land stewards on governance boards, increased engagement of the private sector, and a sustained commitment to an evidence-based approach to increase the likelihood that programs will attain their goals.

Development projects must increasingly include mitigation actions to offset their negative environmental and social impacts. However, current mitigation approaches can exacerbate social inequality by ignoring how the spatial location of offsets affects the benefits local people receive from ecosystem services (ES). Here, we present a method for tracking changes in ES benefits resulting from development and mitigation actions. To demonstrate this approach, we use as an example a proposed road through the Peruvian Amazon. We assessed the road's ES impacts and prioritized offsets in a socially equitable way. We found that the road is likely to have a disproportionate negative effect on drinking-water quality for nearby indigenous communities, and that offsets cannot fully compensate for these impacts. Equity was improved by including ES in spatial prioritization of mitigation. Including ES information in a “serviceshed”-based approach reduced average remaining, unmitigated impacts to drinking-water quality m...