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Practical Strategies for Integrating Ecosystem Goods and Services into Environmental Decision-making
Citation:
Yee, S. Practical Strategies for Integrating Ecosystem Goods and Services into Environmental Decision-making. NEP-ORD Webinar Series, Gulf Breeze, FL, September 24, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
This research presents a number of practical strategies for incorporating Final Ecosystem Goods and Services concepts, and more broadly ecosystem services, into the decision-making process. To be practical, a wide array of adaptable tools and approaches are needed that can be implemented at various levels of depth, stages of the decision process, and levels of experience.
Description:
Federal estuary management programs have widely used ecosystem services concepts to frame management issues and communicate with stakeholders. However, widespread implementation of ecosystem services assessments in estuary management has been limited due to concerns of being too technical, requiring funding and expertise to implement beyond commonly-valued resources such as fisheries, or relying on ambiguous proxies (e.g., water quality, habitat) that may not resonate with stakeholders. Practical strategies are needed that can expand the range of ecosystem services that can be considered; link ecosystem services explicitly to what matters to stakeholders; and be implemented at various levels of depth, stages of the decision process, and levels of experience. This research introduces a simplified conceptual model based on the Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) approach that explicitly links biophysical measures of ecosystem services to the beneficiaries who use them, and proposes tools and methods for operationalizing ecosystem services within a Structured Decision Making framework. Strategies, approaches, and tools are presented to 1) ensure a fuller suite of potential costs and benefits are under consideration, and that key issues or stakeholders are not overlooked; 2) reduce ambiguity and confusion about what is really meant by management objectives by precisely defining biophysical measures that are linked to a specific beneficiary; 3) estimate impacts of changing condition on ecosystem services with variable levels of commitment to resources and time; 4) understand the range of potential outcomes; and 5) consider tradeoffs or identify win-wins across multiple objectives.