Undoing the Damage – it’s Time for Restoration

Biodiversity loss, land degradation and climate change. Not a rosy outlook for 2024… Nevertheless, researchers are tirelessly searching for solutions. To that end, Joern Fischer is the coordinator of a DFG funded research unit entitled “A Social-Ecological Systems Approach to Inform Ecosystem Restoration in Rural Africa”. The research unit asks how ecosystems can be restored and looks at the ecological, social and social-ecological consequences of restoration measures.

Joern, you will spend a lot of time researching restoration of ecosystems in 2024. Why this topic of all possible topics?

A lot of damage has been done by humanity and it’s time to learn how to undo some of the damage. Restoration is one way of trying to do that. What I like about restoration is that it’s trying to do something positive rather than just trying to limit the negative that we’re doing. I like the idea of working on something that actually improves things.

What are your Good New Year’s resolutions that you have set yourself for this project?

The main thing is that we get off to a good start with the whole project team. At the end of January and early February, we have a kick-off meeting in Rwanda. One day will be solely devoted to meeting academics from the University of Rwanda and other academics in Rwanda. And the second day will be devoted to meeting NGO and government stakeholders. It’s super important for the project that we start to build relationships with our colleagues in Rwanda.

You want to develop a social-ecological systems approach to ecosystem restoration. What exactly does that mean?

The key thing about a social-ecological systems understanding as opposed to an ecological understanding with a bit of social science on top is that we are fundamentally interested in the interrelationship between people and nature. We see that the ecosystem provides benefits or disbenefits to people, and people shape the landscape through how they use and care for it.

A social-ecological systems understanding of restoration means that we don’t prioritize from the beginning either the ecology or the people. But we always think of this interrelationship. Conventional restoration thinking has often put the ecosystem first. Then there is this new development in which human wellbeing as an important outcome is emphasised, but this new framing sometimes forgets the ecosystems… We want to think about the interrelationship at all times, and do well in both dimensions.

What are your concrete plans for the project in 2024?

In addition to the kick-off workshop, we also have the first scoping field trips with the entire project team. We’ll be traveling around in multiple cars to different restoration sites to see how we implement the research we’ve planned. The social scientists with their savvy social science eyes and the ecologists looking at the landscape with the ecological eyes.

It’s a bit of a logistic nightmare right now but will be fun to have everyone out in the field at the same time and this will help to build the team and sharpen our research questions. Around May we will start with the actual field work and collect data.

What kind of data?

For example, data on vegetation and the different types of restored landscapes and not-restored landscapes, socio-economic surveys of households and interviews with people on how their livelihoods have changed with restoration activities. Afterwards it’s time to make sense of the first bits of data and try to see how everything comes together.

How is the project organised?

We have eight subprojects. Among them are a synthesis project and a so-called living lab where we co-create innovative restoration solutions together with local stakeholders.

How do you implement your research in practice?

We will focus on what we call social-ecological units. These might be certain parts of a certain landscape, and we will have many of these social-ecological units scattered throughout the region that we’re studying. The social scientists, the ecologists, the social-ecological scientists all focus on the same social-ecological units from their perspective. Sharing social-ecological units is going to be really helpful to integrate our findings later on.

What questions are you asking in 2024 to move the project forward?

For example, how have different types of restoration activities changed the vegetation and its biodiversity, structure and also function across the landscape? How has land cover changed over the last few decades? We also plan to reconstruct the historical trajectory before restoration, and then analyse the changes in landscape pattern as a whole. We will also start to look at households and their economies, asking how people are benefiting from restoration.

What answers and solutions are you hoping for in the Rwanda project in 2024?

Most importantly, we will have established the first rudimentary understanding of our social-ecological units. There are places in the landscape that are extremely diverse, where within just a few hundred meters you find banana plantations, home gardens, woodlot plantings, agroforestry sites, all within one little circle of just a couple of hectares or something. Then there are other places where it’s much more homogenous and you might have an entire hill covered by agroforestry. These places are very different, and we will start to have a first understanding how such places differ in terms of their social, but also their ecological outcomes.

We will also start to have a much better understanding of the key stakeholders in restoration and their dynamics, and quantify the quality of restoration already done. For example, a lot of the planting that is being done is eucalyptus trees, which are not native. Eucalypts are great in some ways, for example to stabilize soils or provide firewood. But ecologically they really aren’t that great. We will have a much better understanding of how restoration to date is working or not working after this first year.

Why did you choose Rwanda as the location for the research?

In 2012, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature together with the German government, launched the so-called Bonn Challenge. Different countries around the world pledged different amounts of land to be restored. Rwanda made one of the most ambitious pledges of all countries. Rwanda’s land was very heavily degraded, and hence, there’s a lot of potential for restoration. Rwanda recognized that for its people to survive and thrive, ecosystems need to be restored. There is a very strong, genuine interest by the Rwandan government to restore landscapes. And they’re interested in also learning from scientists what works well and what doesn’t work well. That makes it a nice testing ground for social-ecological restoration.

How do you feel about 2024 from a sustainability perspective?

I suspect things are going to get worse for the world for a little bit longer until they get better. And that sounds terribly negative, but I’m not even sure that it’s negative as such. Change has always been part of the world. And right now, I think unfortunately we’re seeing a series of changes that are very rapid and, in many cases, not very good for sustainability.

From a more hopeful perspective: We have this very unstable world right now. Instability is usually a sign of change. When systems become quite unstable, it means something’s going to change. And so, I think sooner or later things will change. But for now, I would predict that it’s going to continue to get worse before it gets better.

What could be the role of this project in Rwanda to shape this change?

The nice thing about our focus is that a lot of restoration is happening anyway, in Rwanda and elsewhere. The restoration is not happening because of us. We’re just researching it. As we’re coming up with findings and hopefully if we can develop good relationships with stakeholders, our findings are naturally interesting to the people there, to the stakeholders involved, to the government, to the NGOs involved. Often there’s money for implementing restoration actions, but not necessarily money to research in depth what works and what doesn’t work. If we can provide some insights for how restoration can be done better, then it can generate even better benefits for people or nature. And that’s where our research can really make a difference because there will be more trees planted and restoration activities going on in the future anyway.

Another thing is capacity building. We’re training some Rwandan colleagues, for example, as PhD students in our team and hopefully we’ll also be collaborating with the University of Rwanda in some other ways to build capacity.

Explore the research project here.

Text by Mareike Andert

Coffee – Drink, Culture, Commodity & a Question of Equity

Maria Brück in Ethiopia (picture from Joern Fischer)

And yet another year is almost over… Time is flying by – productively: PhD-student Maria Brück from the SESI at the Leuphana University used the time to finish her research on ecosystem services and equity. Ecosystem services are the benefits humans obtain from nature: plants feed us and walking in forests can help us relax.

Why was nature 2023 important to you personally, Maria?

In my spare time, I like to go camping. I enjoy the freedom and being close to and living in nature. This year, when I was working on finishing my PhD, I sometimes really needed this time to relax and re-charge my batteries.

What was your PhD exactly about?

I studied human-nature relationships by looking at ecosystem services and equity, two concepts which are far too often not seen together. I used the concept of disaggregation to bridge ecosystem services and equity. In this way, I could assess ecosystem services in a more holistic way. Normally, ecosystem services are assessed by aggregation. This means different ecosystem services and related aspects are summed up to an aggregated number.

… a tree is worth x dollars, because it provides different services such as wood or filtering the air. The tree simply gets a price tag…

This aggregated number has the advantage to show a number and create a big message: for example, that rainforests are worth billions of dollars. Many people understand and think in such a monetary approach. However, it is problematic to put a price on nature and assess ecosystem services only from a monetary point of view. If we follow such an approach, we cannot say what a specific ecosystem service actually means for people and who benefits how. We benefit from nature, but not all in the same way. Instead, it is about the relationship to nature, and our relationship with nature depends on who and where we are and what values we have.

Do you have an example?

For my research, I used empirical data from Ethiopia. In our case study region, coffee is grown, and many people benefit from its production and consumption in different ways, depending on if they are, for example, local farmers or German coffee-drinkers. Coffee is more than a commodity; it is also important for the Ethiopian culture. To aggregate the ecosystem service of coffee and its values is too broad and sidelines questions of equity: Who is involved and concerned with coffee? Who makes decisions? Do man and women value and benefit from coffee in the same way and for the same reasons, or not?

With the concept of disaggregation, I considered different questions of equity and different dimensions along which to disaggregate ecosystem services: Which group does benefit where from a certain ecosystem service? Which value types do people ascribe to nature?

A lot of research was already done on understanding the values and benefits of ecosystem services in a qualitative way, but I also tried to quantify these values – not in monetary terms – and asked: Which value type is worth more or less to a person? Which value types do local people ascribe to the ecosystem services that are most important for their livelihoods?  

Why did you choose to study in Ethiopia?

Our case study region in Ethiopia is an interesting place to study ecosystem services and equity. On the one hand, because many people directly depend on nature for their livelihood. Many smallholder farmers are deeply dependent on nature. On the other hand, it is a place which undergoes change: population growth, climate change or the government pushing for industrial agriculture.

What hope does your research give for a sustainable future?

The concept of disaggregation is an abstract tool for the assessment of ecosystem services. When researchers use this concept, it is a first step away from price tags and towards achieving a good life for everyone, by thinking more specifically about what nature means for us and by integrating questions of equity. The concept of disaggregation offers the opportunity to achieve sustainability, because sustainability is about achieving equity within ecological limits.

How can disaggregation as a tool to assess ecosystem services influence politics?

When used, the concept of disaggregation can produce better research results, in the sense that it considers questions of equity and provides arguments for more equitable policies. Policymakers can then include that knowledge in their policymaking. Understanding who benefits from nature in which ways can help policymakers to make more sustainable decisions about how nature is managed, e.g. regarding coffee.

Let us take the example of coffee in Ethiopia again: The future of coffee in Ethiopia can go into different directions. One avenue could be to strongly focus on export-oriented, large-scale plantations. Another avenue could be to take a more balanced approach, stay small-scale, and produce forest-grown coffee in a sustainable way, which also allows for tourism and export.

The answer to the question ‘what is the best option for the Ethiopian coffee industry?’ depends on how you frame the goal and what you consider. If you only consider exchange value and profit, then the best option is plantation. But if you also consider culture and benefits for local people beside money, then your option is to go with small-scale forest coffee production. The perspective of local people and their relationship to nature leads to different decisions.

Impression from the fieldtrip in Ethiopia (picture from David Abson)

A PhD means four years – one topic. What motivated you to keep working?

I enjoy doing science and have an intrinsic motivation for it. I also believe that science, especially sustainability science, is relevant. Also, my surroundings supported me. My project group, the institute and my supervisor found the right balance between guidance and freedom. I was also able to think about alternative approaches to communicate my results, which was nice. For example, we developed a policy-booklet, and I made a dance video about my research to create different access points to my research results.

What did the year 2023 mean to you scientifically?

Me and science in 2023 was a year of achievements and a year of endings. I published papers and finished my PhD, but I also decided to leave academia. I leave academia because I would like to do s more applied work where I see more immediate impact, which could maybe mean doing research in a non-university context to advice politicians or working in science management. Besides, I want more stability. As an early-career scholar, you go from one contract to another contract. I do not want to commit to a life of uncertainty. For now, I have decided to start working in public administration, where I also hope to contribute to the positive future development of our society.

How would you judge the year 2023 for sustainability?

A lot is going on in the world, many crises. My impression is that the attention for core sustainability topics, which have been present for a long time, have less room in the public debate now. Therefore, it is important to continue with research. The question of how we can continue to live on this planet is a central question.

Looking at research, I am hopeful, especially regarding ecosystem services: There is a lot of progress, a growing interest for aspects of equity, more attention for indigenous people and more relevant questions are asked. However, it is challenging to communicate our research to the public. We as scientists want that something comes from our research and changes the world for better.

Text by Mareike Andert

Check out Maria Brück’s inspiring video about her research here.

Check out the policy-booklet “A shared vision for the landscapes of southwestern Ethopia” here.

If you would like to explore this topic further, here are papers from Maria Brück:

Brück, Maria et al. (2022): Broadening the scope of ecosystem services research: Disaggregation as a powerful concept for sustainable natural resource management. Find the paper here.

Brück, Maria et al. (2023): Drivers of ecosystem service specialization in a smallholder agricultural landscape of the Global South: a case study in Ethiopia. Find the paper here.

Brück, Maria et al. (2023): Plural valuation in southwestern Ethiopia: Disaggregating values associated with ecosystems in a smallholder landscape. Find the paper here.

Milestones in sustainability related research and useful readings

I once heard this question being asked within an interview setting for a university position. I thought then, as I do now, that it is an inspiring way to structure my thoughts regarding the different disciplines and associated worldviews I am exposed to, or work with. I find timelines and evolutionary perspectives extremely useful, especially for those who share a time orientated understanding of the world. Rather than thinking in spatial landmarks, I like to create timelines in my mind. I suppose structuring research fields would also work nicely (or even nicer) with mind maps.

Following this logic, I tried to sketch some personal answers, which would probably need some revisiting soon enough. I would like to share with you a few relatively recent trends that I see gathering even more momentum in the near future, being aware there are many other milestones one could consider. In sharing these thoughts, I think mainly about young PhD students or academia scholars, but mostly non-academia professionals, such as practitioners working in the field of sustainable development. Hence, this is fairly simplified, with only a few references and suggested readings of papers deemed representative of their respective field.

We tried to debate some of these thoughts in our yet “pilot journal club”, so this may serve as a proposition for a more “holistic” journal club session.

Photo credits: http://chelonianri.org

Ecosystem services (ES) research

Research on ES evolved quickly from conceptualization, localized documentation and modeling of ecological dynamics, to policy and management applications, such as the creation of payment schemes for ES. A very nice timeline is provided by Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010. Ecologists, economists and policy makers now widely engage with the concept, turning ES into a heuristic tool for revealing the multiple ways in which ecosystems support human well-being, an operational tool for making decisions, and a compelling language for policy makers. At the same time, the concept has generated a lot of criticism because of its hypertrophied focus on utilitarianism and potential commodification of nature (e.g. Schröter et al., 2014). Specifically, some authors have viewed ES as a one sided simplistic metaphor of human-environment relationships (e.g. Norgaard 2010, Raymond et al. 2013), ignoring different, often non-material, values that beneficiaries may assign to ecosystems. In response, new research agendas have emerged, including issues of: co-production by social-ecological systems, socio-cultural valuation of ES (e.g. Martín-López et al. 2014, Scholte et al. 2015) depending on a wide variety of values that stakeholders assign to ES (based on well on their own held values) (e.g. Ives and Kendal 2014), equity (e.g. Pascual et al. 2014), benefit distribution and disaggregation of beneficiaries based on various criteria such as location or gender (e.g. Daw 2009). The academic discourse on ES has roughly followed down the Haines-Young and Potschin ‘cascade’ towards recognizing their stakeholder driven nature. At the current stage there is growing interest in studying and understanding the more anthropospheric side (e.g. Spangenberg et al. 2014), or the ‘subjective end’ of the cascade: the plurality of benefits and values associated with different beneficiaries and their well-being. The general discourse is moving towards stakeholders, their capabilities (e.g. Polishchuk and Rauschmayer 2012), agency, interest, power (e.g. Fisher et al. 2013, Felipe Lucia et al. 2015), preferences, inner values, and the totality of social processes influencing the cascade: mobilization, appropriation, value articulation (e.g. Ernstson 2008), management, governance, normative foundations (e.g. Abson et al. 2014).

Social-ecological systems (SES) research

This point has been thoroughly dealt with in a previous more detailed blog entry (see also here). In short and simply put, present discourses seem to focus on the fundamental connection between the social and the ecological system, and, at the same time, the risk of disconnection or the dangers of teleconnections (e.g. Challies 2014), as well as potential solutions such as innovative re-connections supporting a transition towards sustainability. To these ends, SES research is striving to accommodate and adapt its frameworks to the social dynamics of globalizing systems inherently pertaining to a global economy and market. A variety of new conceptual frameworks (e.g. Diaz et al. 2015, Diaz et al. 2011, Fisher et. al 2014) are trying to capture better the interlinkages and interdependencies between nature and people and between science and society, while acknowledging them as being an integrative part of the other, and inseparable in reality. Authors are increasingly placing the focus on the knowledge about links between “the social” and “the ecological”, knowledge that was generated beyond disciplinary boundaries, at the interface between science and society (e.g. Fischer et al. in 2015). Papers are proposing various recoupling strategies (e.g. Fischer et al. in 2012), emphasizing reconnecting social-ecological feedbacks (Folke et al. 2011), such as more effective “virtuous circles” between natural, cultural, and economic assets (e.g. Plieninger and Bieling 2013, Selman and Knight 2006).

(Cultural) landscape research

The landscape lens brings forward the landscape as an arena for sustainable development and knowledge integration. Here, I would chose to stop over the rise of landscape stewardship, as a way to operationalize moral concerns in relation to social-ecological interactions that were enounced as early as the 50s (Leopold, 1949). Science for relinking communities and landscapes draws attention to the potential of landscape stewardship as one of the ambitious but effective ways to achieve sustainable management and design inclusive rural development policies (e.g. Plieninger et al. 2015). Integrating a broad suite of landscape values through engaged forms of stewardship is thought to balance out the dependency on active outside input (again inherent to a globalized world).

Sustainability science research

An important acknowledged milestone for sustainability science is re-thinking boundaries and structures, overcoming societal roles, and transforming the science-society interface, through for example the co-design of research projects and the co-production of knowledge fitting with transdisciplinary approaches (e.g. Lang et al. 2012, Brandt et al. 2013). Other suggested pathways are the recognition of its normative foundations through mapping and deliberating sustainability held values (e.g. Miller et al. 2014).

Resilience thinking

Resilience thinking continues to receive a lot of criticism for not sufficiently acknowledged limits such as the lack of attention to normative and epistemological issues. Recent discourse on resilience aims to open towards fields more engaged with the issues of power and agency such as political ecology or sociology, which may complement the arguably functional perspective of resilience. A permanent work in progress, resilience theory continues to develop, striving for a more complete knowledge integration of human and ecological dynamics. A more detailed perspective is offered here.

Sustainability related governance research

Finally, I am not sure to which extent this is a milestone, but I retained that in addition to the governance models incorporating elements of participatory (non-state multi-actor engagement, e.g. industry, NGOs) and multi-level governance, recent literature calls for polycentricity, further emphasizing the idea of a collaborative dispersion of authority (Biggs et al. 2015). Advanced polycentric systems comprise multiple independent centers of decision making, with different levels of inclusiveness, collaborating horizontally and vertically at various scales. In theory, these systems may isolate failures, but if successful, may be reproduced elsewhere. I found this idea worthy of further explorations in contexts with a diversity of elements pertaining to the social subsystems: different formal and informal institutions, land-use preferences, management approaches, various values, perspectives and interests such as identified in Southern Transylvania.

In conclusion, I take from these potential milestones that the general trend seems to be towards integration of existing knowledge, conceptual and epistemological openness and plurality, and maybe even a ‘subjectivisation’ of science, in hope of achieving meaningful contributions towards normative goals.

As for future directions, I guess one of the main questions that stems from the above are: 1. Do we need to engage more in these pathways, and if so how can we capitalize on them? 2. Do any of these potential milestones are going to lead to any fundamental changes in approaches towards sustainability (e.g. mainstreaming transdisciplinarity?)

As already mentioned, there are many other interesting developing directions in all of the scientific disciplines I touched upon. The few selected are reflective of a particular research experience and perspective I had from my positioning as a PhD student dealing with the ecology of the social system. This is just a starting point from where the mind can continue traveling boundlessly to imagine infinite perspectives outside comfort zones.

References

• Abson, D. J., H. Von Wehrden, S. Baumgärtner, J. Fischer, J. Hanspach, W. Härdtle, H. Heinrichs et al. “Ecosystem services as a boundary object for sustainability.” Ecological Economics 103 (2014): 29-37.
• *Bennett, Elena M., Wolfgang Cramer, Alpina Begossi, Georgina Cundill, Sandra Díaz, Benis N. Egoh, Ilse R. Geijzendorffer et al. “Linking biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being: three challenges for designing research for sustainability.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14 (2015): 76-85.
• *Biggs, Reinette, Maja Schlüter, and Michael L. Schoon, eds. Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• *Brandt, Patric, et al. “A review of transdisciplinary research in sustainability science.” Ecological Economics 92 (2013): 1-15.
• Challies, Edward, Jens Newig, and Andrea Lenschow. “What role for social–ecological systems research in governing global teleconnections?.” Global Environmental Change 27 (2014): 32-40.
• *Cote, Muriel, and Andrea J. Nightingale. “Resilience thinking meets social theory Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research.” Progress in Human Geography4 (2012): 475-489.
• Daw, Tim, Katrina Brown, Sergio Rosendo, and Robert Pomeroy. “Applying the ecosystem services concept to poverty alleviation: the need to disaggregate human well-being.” Environmental Conservation 38, no. 04 (2011): 370-379.
• Díaz, Sandra, Fabien Quétier, Daniel M. Cáceres, Sarah F. Trainor, Natalia Pérez-Harguindeguy, M. Syndonia Bret-Harte, Bryan Finegan, Marielos Peña-Claros, and Lourens Poorter. “Linking functional diversity and social actor strategies in a framework for interdisciplinary analysis of nature’s benefits to society.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 3 (2011): 895-902.
• Díaz, Sandra, Sebsebe Demissew, Julia Carabias, Carlos Joly, Mark Lonsdale, Neville Ash, Anne Larigauderie et al. “The IPBES Conceptual Framework—connecting nature and people.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14 (2015): 1-16.
• Ernstson, Henrik. “The social production of ecosystem services: lessons from urban resilience research.” Ernston, H, In Rhizomia: Actors, Networks and Resilience in Urban Landscapes, PhD Thesis, Stockholm University (2008).
• Felipe-Lucia, María R., Berta Martín-López, Sandra Lavorel, Luis Berraquero-Díaz, Javier Escalera-Reyes, and Francisco A. Comín. “Ecosystem Services Flows: Why Stakeholders’ Power Relationships Matter.” PloS one 10, no. 7 (2015): e0132232.
• *Fischer, Joern, et al. “Advancing sustainability through mainstreaming a social–ecological systems perspective.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14 (2015): 144-149.
• Fischer, Joern, Tibor Hartel, and Tobias Kuemmerle. “Conservation policy in traditional farming landscapes.” Conservation Letters 5, no. 3 (2012): 167-175.
• *Fisher, Janet A., et al. “Strengthening conceptual foundations: analyzing frameworks for ecosystem services and poverty alleviation research.” Global Environmental Change5 (2013): 1098-1111.
• Fisher, Janet A., Genevieve Patenaude, Kalpana Giri, Kristina Lewis, Patrick Meir, Patricia Pinho, Mark DA Rounsevell, and Mathew Williams. “Understanding the relationships between ecosystem services and poverty alleviation: a conceptual framework.” Ecosystem services 7 (2014): 34-45.
• Fisher, Janet A., Genevieve Patenaude, Patrick Meir, Andrea J. Nightingale, Mark DA Rounsevell, Mathew Williams, and Iain H. Woodhouse. “Strengthening conceptual foundations: analysing frameworks for ecosystem services and poverty alleviation research.” Global Environmental Change 23, no. 5 (2013): 1098-1111.
• Folke, Carl, Åsa Jansson, Johan Rockström, Per Olsson, Stephen R. Carpenter, F. Stuart Chapin III, Anne-Sophie Crépin et al. “Reconnecting to the biosphere.” Ambio 40, no. 7 (2011): 719-738.
• Gómez-Baggethun, Erik, Rudolf De Groot, Pedro L. Lomas, and Carlos Montes. “The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: from early notions to markets and payment schemes.” Ecological Economics 69, no. 6 (2010): 1209-1218.
• Ives, Christopher D., and Dave Kendal. “The role of social values in the management of ecological systems.” Journal of environmental management 144 (2014): 67-72.
• *Lang, Daniel J., et al. “Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges.” Sustainability science1 (2012): 25-43.
• Leopold, Aldo. The land ethic. USA, 1949.
• Martín-López, Berta, Erik Gómez-Baggethun, Marina García-Llorente, and Carlos Montes. “Trade-offs across value-domains in ecosystem services assessment.” Ecological Indicators 37 (2014): 220-228.
• Miller, Thaddeus R., Arnim Wiek, Daniel Sarewitz, John Robinson, Lennart Olsson, David Kriebel, and Derk Loorbach. “The future of sustainability science: a solutions-oriented research agenda.” Sustainability science 9, no. 2 (2014): 239-246.
• *Newig, Jens, and Oliver Fritsch. Environmental governance: participatory, multi-level-and effective?. No. 15/2008. UFZ Diskussionspapiere, 2008.
• Norgaard, Richard B. “Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder.” Ecological economics 69, no. 6 (2010): 1219-1227.
• Pascual, Unai, Jacob Phelps, Eneko Garmendia, Katrina Brown, Esteve Corbera, Adrian Martin, Erik Gomez-Baggethun, and Roldan Muradian. “Social equity matters in payments for ecosystem services.” BioScience (2014): biu146.
• Plieninger, Tobias, and Claudia Bieling. “Resilience-based perspectives to guiding high-nature-value farmland through socioeconomic change.” Ecology and Society 18, no. 4 (2013).
• *Plieninger, Tobias, and Claudia Bieling. Resilience and the cultural landscape: understanding and managing change in human-shaped environments. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• *Plieninger, Tobias, et al. “Exploring ecosystem-change and society through a landscape lens: recent progress in European landscape research.” Ecology and Society2 (2015): 5.
• Polishchuk, Yuliana, and Felix Rauschmayer. “Beyond “benefits”? Looking at ecosystem services through the capability approach.” Ecological Economics 81 (2012): 103-111.
• Raymond, Christopher M., Gerald G. Singh, Karina Benessaiah, Joanna R. Bernhardt, Jordan Levine, Harry Nelson, Nancy J. Turner, Bryan Norton, Jordan Tam, and Kai MA Chan. “Ecosystem services and beyond: Using multiple metaphors to understand human–environment relationships.” BioScience 63, no. 7 (2013): 536-546.
• Scholte, Samantha SK, Astrid JA van Teeffelen, and Peter H. Verburg. “Integrating socio-cultural perspectives into ecosystem service valuation: A review of concepts and methods.” Ecological Economics 114 (2015): 67-78.
• Schröter, Matthias, Emma H. Zanden, Alexander PE Oudenhoven, Roy P. Remme, Hector M. Serna‐Chavez, Rudolf S. Groot, and Paul Opdam. “Ecosystem services as a contested concept: a synthesis of critique and counter‐” Conservation Letters 7, no. 6 (2014): 514-523.
• Selman, Paul, and Melanie Knight. “On the nature of virtuous change in cultural landscapes: Exploring sustainability through qualitative models.” Landscape Research 31, no. 3 (2006): 295-307.
• Spangenberg, Joachim H., Christina von Haaren, and Josef Settele. “The ecosystem service cascade: Further developing the metaphor. Integrating societal processes to accommodate social processes and planning, and the case of bioenergy.” Ecological Economics 104 (2014): 22-32.
• *Turner, Matthew D. “Political ecology I An alliance with resilience?.” Progress in Human Geography (2013): 0309132513502770.

*Suggested readings

A post that might be about scales, or levels, but certainly includes ecosystem services and leverage points

This post was originally intended to be about my frustration with the ecosystem services concept. In trying to articulate and understand this frustration, I’ve gone through a range of thoughts, which I will explain here. I am getting a bit paranoid that I always seem to come back to issues of scale in my research, and I seem to have done it here again. But I hope it makes some sense, and is more than just an incoherent rambling.

I will start with why I like the ecosystem service concept. I am an interdisciplinary researcher studying natural resource management. The ecosystem service concept is a clear framework for connecting the social world to the physical world. It makes explicit the links between a component of an ecosystem and the various things that it is valued for by people. It seems simple; pollinators are valued because they pollinate crops and other plants, and we like this because we eat, we like pretty meadows, etc. We can then follow this on to further services supported by the pretty meadows, such as recreation and the existence values humans ascribe to such meadows. Being able to follow these chains is useful in understanding the socio-ecological system in any given location. It is also useful for explaining to people how environmental change might directly affect them by impacting on the things they value.

I do share frustrations with other researchers over the grouping together of services and benefits, and the different stages of service (and benefit) in the ecosystem service concept. For this reason, I try to use the idea of intermediary services, final services and benefits. Whereby pollinators pollinating is an intermediary service, the crop is the final service, and the profit from that crop is the benefit to the producer. The consumer may also experience benefit through having food to eat, and preferably at a lower price than they would have been willing to pay. These groupings get long, and interconnect with each other. So the pollinators could lead to multiple benefits, but also could be created through multiple earlier services. Then we are more within a cascade model (e.g. Haines-Young and Potschin, 2010), whereby there is structure (e.g. habitat), process, function, service and benefit.

I find that my main frustrations are introduced when we start to use the concept for practical management. We start to think about how we can increase the number of pollinators. But then we need to recognise that such actions have a trade-off; for example increasing wildflower meadows to support bees may decrease the crop production space, or the habitat for another animal, which then negatively impacts upon another ecosystem service, or multiple ecosystem services in a complex web whereby we need to trade-off goals and priorities (see e.g. Bennet et al., 2009; Raudsepp-Hearne et al., 2010 and others). Some researchers have started to ‘bundle’ ecosystem services to simplify understandings of such trade-offs. Bundles comprise of services that usually appear together and are influenced similarly, such that actions that are beneficial to one service in the group will be beneficial to others, but possibly act negatively on another group. Indeed, a benefit of the ecosystem services concept is that we have a framework for thinking about trade-offs. However, for management purposes, we really lack the knowledge of what actions done in what quantity have which impacts (positive and negative) over which ecosystem services.

While thinking about various actions that could manage ecosystem services, I started to think about ecosystem services within a systems thinking framework. I borrowed the figure below from Donella Meadows’ essay ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’. The idea being that where there is a discrepancy between how we want a system to look, and how it really looks, we can target either the inflows or the outflows from that system in order to remove the discrepancy. Meadows outlines leverage points as being points to intervene in a system, with changing parameters as shallower (and less effective) points, and changing goals as deeper (and more effective). If we use the ecosystem service concept within this framework, we could put pollinators in the central box. Then we can define the goal (e.g. to produce a given amount of oil seed rape). Then we find leverage points to target either the inflow (births, in-migration) or outflow (death through habitat loss, disease) of pollinators in the landscape such that the discrepancy reduction becomes the practical problem.

Currently, according to the way the ecosystem services concept is being operationalized, we are seeking to understand how to target inflow and/or outflow. Most systems are complex, such that this individual component is connected with many others. And often, relationships between components work differently across space. Thus if we are to manage by ecosystem services, we need to model relationships for all locations where there may be variation. And this is being done; we are characterising benefits, understanding how changes in the system affect them. In doing so, I feel somewhat as though we are distracting ourselves by creating ever more complex physical constructs that require even more detailed physical understandings, and ever more complex chains of structures, processes, services and benefits. Great – it is interesting, and should be pursued in the interests of knowledge. But in the end, we are left with very prescriptive sets of measures that can be applied in very specific circumstances locations, depending on what goals we want to achieve.

And to me, it is this questions of ‘what goals?’ and ‘who decides?’ that are my fundamental concerns with the ecosystem services concept. The way the ecosystem service concept is currently being enacted encourages us to work backwards. We are picking a small number of services, and defining goals for each, or for small groups by making decisions on trade-offs. But we aren’t looking at the overall collective system. We are defining the interventions for small components of the system before defining the overall goals. In doing so, we aren’t allowing ourselves to target the deepest, most effective leverage points. We should be asking questions around what we want to manage the system for. Do we want to optimise certain services? Or balance all services? Do we have a particular goal for a resilient system? If we had a goal, we could start to really think about what the discrepancy is, and how to intervene; knowledge could be targeted towards it.

I wonder if we need to start by considering scales of a nested system. If we have started out at the most detailed scale with individual ecosystem services, the next scale up might be biodiversity as the system that incorporates the individual services. This way, the services included within the biodiversity system and their goals influence the working definition of biodiversity. Alternatively, or at same time, by setting goals around biodiversity, we could follow these back to figure out what goals to set for individual ecosystem services. I’m not sure biodiversity is the right grouping concept at this scale – perhaps others have thoughts?! We also get to consider the larger scale system that ‘biodiversity’ (or whatever we settle on) is a part of. Perhaps that system is one of sustainable development (or perhaps I’ve skipped some scales), in which biodiversity might be a sub-system, alongside public health, economic growth, education, etc. Again, we get to define goals for this system, but also see that the sub-systems provide operational definitions for the system goals through their own goals.

So in short, I think I have ended up with my frustration with ecosystem services being that they isolate components of an ecosystem from its broader, interlinked, multi-scale ecosystems. And I have yet to be able to use it to manage anything.