Abstract
IntroductionEcosystem goods and services (EGS) studies have had little impact on policy processes and real-world decision-making due to limited understanding of the interactions and feedbacks among ecological, social and economic processes. Here we present an inter- and transdisciplinary analysis of global change impacts on EGS provision in a European mountain region. Our aim is to evaluate the projected influence of ecological, economic and social drivers on future EGS provision and to show possible ways to address the predominant limitations of EGS studies.MethodsThe integrated findings from ecological experiments, mechanistic models of landscape dynamics, socio-economic land-use models, policy analysis and transdisciplinary stakeholder interactions are presented consecutively. Four regionally downscaled global change scenarios, for a case study region near Visp, Switzerland (350 km2), were used to examine the impacts of climate and socio-economic changes on four ecosystem services, i.e., food provision, timber production, net greenhouse gas emissions and protection from natural hazards.ResultsOur simulation results reveal four key aspects that influence the future provision of mountain EGS. First, we show the high spatial and temporal heterogeneity of EGS provision even in a small case study region. Second, we find that climate change impacts are much more pronounced for forest EGS, while changes to agricultural EGS result primarily from shifts in economic conditions. Third, our modeling results reveal the complex trade-offs associated with the different scenarios. Fourth, simulations illustrate the importance of interactions between environmental shifts and economic decisions. We discuss our simulation results with respect to both existing policy networks and transdisciplinary stakeholder interactions.ConclusionWe describe a framework based on experiments and observations that effectively supports the integration of ecological processes into an integrative modeling chain of EGS provision in mountain regions, the political decision-making process and also transdisciplinary stakeholder interactions.
Highlights
Ecosystem goods and services (EGS) studies have had little impact on policy processes and real-world decision-making due to limited understanding of the interactions and feedbacks among ecological, social and economic processes
Simulation results for relative changes in EGS provision for the years 2050 and 2080 are presented for food and timber provision (Figure 3) and for carbon sequestration and rock fall protection (Figure 4)
To reflect the different climatic and ecological conditions in the case study region, we distinguish between low elevations in the main valley around Visp (400–800 m a.s.l.), intermediate elevations (800– 1,600 m a.s.l.) and high elevations
Summary
Ecosystem goods and services (EGS) studies have had little impact on policy processes and real-world decision-making due to limited understanding of the interactions and feedbacks among ecological, social and economic processes. A wide range of EGS studies have used this approach (reviewed in Seppelt et al 2011), a challenge still remains, namely the effective integration of ecological, economic and social components into an internally consistent framework that can be used to project future changes in EGS and their response to different driving forces. For many stakeholders, including government agencies (Euliss et al 2011), it is important to have robust and consistent approaches when assessing the effect of management actions on ecological processes and changes in EGS. Such approaches, are confronted with four main challenges. While the EGS viewpoint facilitates an analysis of ecological processes from the ecological systems perspective, various scale differences and cross-scale dynamics (Young 2002; Cash et al 2006) still make it difficult to obtain an integrative overview of ecological and human systems
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