Just benefit flows: Understanding who benefits from ecosystem services for equitable, resilient and sustainable development

SITAS, N; PÉREZ HARGUINDEGUY, NATALIA; NEL JL

Oaxaca

Conferencia; II Conference of the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society; 2017

Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society

Benefits from ecosystem services flow through diverse pathways, and are not necessarily distributed equitably across social-ecological systems. Benefits might flow to influential or politically-strong groups rather than to more marginalised rural communities. They may be accessed in situ, or contribute substantially to development needs that are a far distance away. Identifying those who benefit from ecosystem services and understanding how benefits are distributed among individuals and stakeholder groups, and across spatial and temporal scales, is a prerequisite for equitable, resilient and sustainable development. The ecoSERVICES community, a core project of Future Earth, has identified this as one of the three key challenges in ecosystem service science in practice (Bennet et al. 2015). Through this workshop, ecoSERVICES would like to draw together scientists and practitioners from around the world, to tackle the following objectives:1) Explore methods for assessing winners and losers of ecosystem service benefits, and the power dynamics that shape such social-ecological trade-offs2) Explore methods of making local dynamics of ecosystem service benefit flows more explicit in global assessments (e.g. IPBES and SDGs) This workshop mobilises knowledge on the dynamics of ecosystem service benefit flows for use in sustainable development. It considers interactions among diverse users, across multiple scales, and within different local contexts. It makes a central contribution to theme 3 of the PECS conference (Social-ecological dynamics of ecosystem services). Its focus on mobilising knowledge for sustainable development planning contributes towards themes 1 and 2 on place-based and global sustainability. The complex, adaptive, and distant interactions between users further necessitates that the workshop participants consider cross-scale connections and feedbacks in social-ecological systems, thereby contributing to theme 4 of the conference.