TY - JOUR
T1 - Ecosystem services in practice
T2 - Challenges to real world implementation of ecosystem services across multiple landscapes - A critical review
AU - Portman, Michelle
N1 - Funding Information:
This research has been funded by the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection , Grant no. 121-5-1 and the DEMARN project – Designation and Management of Marine Reserve Networks (European Commission, FP7 2007–2013 SP3-People, Grant 268115 ). The author wishes to thank S. Polinov for initial collection of sources and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
PY - 2013/12
Y1 - 2013/12
N2 - Ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem services assessment (ESA) have become common parlance in the environmental field. Scientists, policy-makers and activists have promoted the ES approach as a means of conveying the extent of threats to natural ecosystems with the goal of crafting socially acceptable and effective policy to address ecological threats and biodiversity conservation. Yet there are some significant challenges to wide acceptance of the ES approach which hinder its absorption into the mainstream geography literature. This paper reviews the historical development of the ES approach focusing on its relevance to applied geography at different stages of its development, describes the present state-of-the-art of ES, and synthesizes the results from several seminal papers and reports. I posit that there are two major stumbling blocks: 1) the difficulty of simplifying complexities between services so that statutory planning processes can incorporate the approach, and 2) the lack of cross-landscape assessment methods and examples. If we focus on the most immediately surmountable challenges to the ES approach much progress could be made in a short time. The subsequent and final substantive section of this review summaries these challenges and offers some suggestions for moving forward.
AB - Ecosystem services (ES) and ecosystem services assessment (ESA) have become common parlance in the environmental field. Scientists, policy-makers and activists have promoted the ES approach as a means of conveying the extent of threats to natural ecosystems with the goal of crafting socially acceptable and effective policy to address ecological threats and biodiversity conservation. Yet there are some significant challenges to wide acceptance of the ES approach which hinder its absorption into the mainstream geography literature. This paper reviews the historical development of the ES approach focusing on its relevance to applied geography at different stages of its development, describes the present state-of-the-art of ES, and synthesizes the results from several seminal papers and reports. I posit that there are two major stumbling blocks: 1) the difficulty of simplifying complexities between services so that statutory planning processes can incorporate the approach, and 2) the lack of cross-landscape assessment methods and examples. If we focus on the most immediately surmountable challenges to the ES approach much progress could be made in a short time. The subsequent and final substantive section of this review summaries these challenges and offers some suggestions for moving forward.
KW - Biodiversity conservation
KW - Ecosystem service assessments
KW - Ecosystem services
KW - Geographic information systems
KW - Marine services
KW - Policy integration
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84885349329&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.09.011
DO - 10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.09.011
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AN - SCOPUS:84885349329
SN - 0143-6228
VL - 45
SP - 185
EP - 192
JO - Applied Geography
JF - Applied Geography
ER -
