Ecosystem services: From theory to implementation — PNAS

FEATURE ARTICLE by Gretchen C. Daily and Pamela A. Matson published in PNAS -Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online

Around the world, leaders are increasingly recognizing ecosystems as natural capital assets that supply life-support services of tremendous value. The challenge is to turn this recognition into incentives and institutions that will guide wise investments in natural capital, on a large scale. Advances are required on three key fronts, each featured here: the science of ecosystem production functions and service mapping; the design of appropriate finance, policy, and governance systems; and the art of implementing these in diverse biophysical and social contexts. Scientific understanding of ecosystem production functions is improving rapidly but remains a limiting factor in incorporating natural capital into decisions, via systems of national accounting and other mechanisms. Novel institutional structures are being established for a broad array of services and places, creating a need and opportunity for systematic assessment of their scope and limitations. Finally, it is clear that formal sharing of experience, and defining of priorities for future work, could greatly accelerate the rate of innovation and uptake of new approaches.

Even in the face of intensifying pressures and risks on the global environmental front, there is a growing feeling of Renaissance in the conservation community. This flows from the promise in reaching, together with a much more diverse and powerful set of leaders than in the past, for new approaches that align economic forces with conservation, and that explicitly link human and environmental well-being (1). And this promise is flowering thanks to substantial recent advances in key areas of inquiry, such as ecology, economics, and institutions, and their integration (2–5).

Conservation efforts now are expanding into realms well beyond reserves, beyond charity, and beyond biodiversity—and into the mainstream (6). While retaining a core focus on protected areas designed to sustain biodiversity, the new arenas of conservation are much bigger and much more complex than the old. They encompass new places dominated by human activity, new revenue streams from public and private sectors, and new goals of ecosystem service provision. In fact, they encompass important elements of traditional, non-Western approaches (7, 8). Scholars and practitioners are seeking to make conservation economically attractive and commonplace, routine in the decision-making of individuals, communities, corporations, and governments (9).

Here, we feature contributions that span the fundamental science of ecosystem services through to the design, implementation, and assessment of finance and policy mechanisms and systems of governance. Each contribution is oriented around decisions, often cast in terms of tradeoffs among alternative future scenarios of change, whether in natural resource management, population, climate, or other key drivers.
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Ecosystem services: From theory to implementation — PNAS