Planning for the conservation and management of ecosystem services in Central Chile

Abstract

The ecosystem services concept emphasizes the benefits societies obtain from ecosystems. These benefits include the production of food and clean water, the regulation of floods, provision for recreation and scenic beauty, a connection to place, and inspiration. Ecosystem services have become popular within both scientific and policy circles as a means to document the value humans place on ecosystems, evaluating these benefits from nature and using the resulting knowledge to inform land-use management decisions. The integration of ecosystem services into decision-making, nevertheless, remains challenging. The research that comprises this thesis provides a comprehensive framework for strengthening the dialogue between ecosystem services assessment and decision-making. My case studies focus on critical challenges in the translation and transformation of ecosystem services as a concept, to a component that improves environmental decision-making. Numerous assessments have quantified, mapped, and valued ecosystem services. However, much of the literature fails to clarify how the information gathered in such assessments can be used to inform decisions that will affect ecosystem services. I propose a framework for making decisions for ecosystem services adapted from decision science and synthesize the degree to which the peer-reviewed ecosystem services literature has captured these steps. I find that the ecosystem services literature has not covered all the steps of a formal decision-making process. For the ecosystem service paradigm to gain traction in science and policy arenas, future ecosystem service assessments should have clearly articulated objectives and meet user-related measures for ecosystem services, seek to evaluate the consequences of scenario alternatives, and facilitate closer engagement between scientists and stakeholders. There is a paucity of studies of ecosystem services assessments under global change, particularly in the developing countries of Latin America. I demonstrate a rapid assessment of the impacts of global change on key ecosystem services in the data-sparse region of Central Chile. This approach translates expert-derived qualitative scenario storylines into quantitative spatial predictions of the combined effects of climate change, urbanization and fire events on the future provision of carbon storage, wine production, and scenic beauty for the year 2050. I find that the cumulative impacts of climate change and urbanization are likely to place considerable pressure on ecosystem services in Central Chile by mid-century revealing the need for stronger planning regulations to manage land-use change. In environmental decision-making, there is increasing attention towards equity of access to ecosystem services, and in conservation implementation. In central Chile, distribution of ecosystem services must be considered within the context of substantial economic and social inequity. I develop a user-related measure to assess the accessibility of the population to the protected area network. I assess the level of fairness of the distribution of cultural ecosystem services benefits at a regional scale using data on visits to protected areas derived from geotagged photographs posted on social media. I explore underlying socioeconomic variables explaining the distribution of cultural ecosystem services benefits and identify landscape attributes of the protected areas influencing social preferences. This approach reveals that the distribution of benefits from nature visits is unequal in this region — wealthier people visit protected areas that are further away while people with lower incomes visit protected areas that are closer to home. Larger protected areas, and those that are more biodiverse are the most visited. By providing information on the spatial flows of people to protected areas, I demonstrate the opportunities for expansion of the protected area network to improve equitable access to the benefits provided by nature. I explore the cost-effective expansion of the protected area network with the main objective of achieving biodiversity targets while also increasing social accessibility to the benefits provided by protected areas. I highlight spatial priority areas for conservation scenarios: (i) minimizing land acquisition cost, (ii) maximizing social accessibility seeking to minimize the extent to which people will have limited access to protected areas, and (iii) minimizing the trade-off between cost and accessibility. The trade-off scenario illustrated that it is possible to expand the protected area network, increasing social accessibility and increasing biodiversity representation while minimizing cost. This scenario suggested that social accessibility could be improved by 40% and biodiversity by 70% at an increase in cost of only 33%. Expanding the protected area network to achieve conservation with the joint aims of enhancing social accessibility and reducing land cost could potentially increase the success of protected areas as a conservation tool by bringing people closer to nature. Finally, I provide a synthesis of the thesis, highlighting key contributions to the ecosystem services research agenda, and ways in which ecosystem services science should advance by presenting key challenges to be tackled in future research. This thesis advances the field by applying decision science to ecosystem services assessments, providing evidence for incorporating ecosystem services into land-use decision-making that is transferable and can help to achieve ambitious international policy goals.