Abstract
Rapidly developing countries contain both the bulk of intact natural areas and biodiversity, and the greatest untapped natural resource stocks, placing them at the forefront of “green” economic development opportunities. However, most lack scientific tools to create development plans that account for biodiversity and ecosystem services, diminishing the real potential to be sustainable. Existing methods focus on biodiversity and carbon priority areas across large geographies (e.g., countries, states/provinces), leaving out essential services associated with water supplies, among others. These hydrologic ecosystem services (HES) are especially absent from methods applied at large geographies and in data-limited contexts. Here, we present a novel, spatially explicit, and relatively simple methodology to identify countrywide HES priority areas. We applied our methodology to the Gabonese Republic, a country undergoing a major economic transformation under a governmental commitment to balance conservation and development goals. We present the first national-scale maps of HES priority areas across Gabon for erosion control, nutrient retention, and groundwater recharge. Priority sub-watersheds covered 44% of the country’s extent. Only 3% of the country was identified as a priority area for all HES simultaneously, highlighting the need to conserve different areas for each different hydrologic service. While spatial tradeoffs occur amongst HES, we identified synergies with two other conservation values, given that 66% of HES priority areas intersect regions of above average area-weighted (by sub-watersheds) total forest carbon stocks and 38% intersect with terrestrial national parks. Considering implications for development, we identified HES priority areas overlapping current or proposed major roads, forestry concessions, and active mining concessions, highlighting the need for proactive planning for avoidance areas and compensatory offsets to mitigate potential conflicts. Collectively, our results provide insight into strategies to protect HES as part of Gabon’s development strategy, while providing a replicable methodology for application to new scales, geographies, and policy contexts.
Highlights
As the global population approaches 9 billion people or more, major investments in infrastructure, energy, agriculture, and other sectors are projected to occur in the coming decades [1]
The priority areas for each hydrologic ecosystem services (HES) are spread throughout the country, with partially different patterns across the services and for the “all population” versus “rural-weighted” scenarios (Fig 4). We focus on these priority areas, while providing in S1 Fig all of the sub-watershed results divided into quintiles of highest to lowest priority
The results show the greatest spatial overlap in priority areas for erosion control and nutrient retention, with groundwater recharge having substantially less overlap
Summary
As the global population approaches 9 billion people or more, major investments in infrastructure, energy, agriculture, and other sectors are projected to occur in the coming decades [1] Where these investments occur and how they are operated will impact biodiversity and the benefits nature provides to people, called ecosystem services [2,3,4]. A key global challenge facing society is how to achieve development goals while protecting the planet’s biodiversity and human life-support systems [5,6,7,8] To address this challenge, new science and policy approaches are emerging that integrate conservation values into sustainable or “green” economic development pathways (e.g., [4, 9, 10]). Practice lags behind rhetoric, and key gaps remain in methods to identify and create development plans that avoid sensitive biodiversity and ecosystem-service areas and alter development activities for minimal impact [11]
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