Making the Protection of Ecosystem Services more Systematic

Systematic conservation planning has been applied as a rigorous and transparent approach to inform solutions for biodiversity protection globally, and is increasingly incorporating ecosystem services thinking. This is critical, as we require actions to ensure long-term prosperity for both people and nature. However in our new paper (now out online in TREE https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2020.08.016) we show how most systematic conservation planning studies are based on an incomplete integration of the components and characteristics of ecosystem services that relate to benefit delivery. As such, landscape plans may fail to generate positive and equitable outcomes for people. In the paper we describe where and how to incorporate the supply, demand and flow components of ecosystem services into a formal decision problem for spatial planning. We also emphasise the need to build decision problems that explicitly include benefits to different people in space, time and socioeconomic status.