An environmental justice perspective on ecosystem services.

Mainstreaming of ecosystem service approaches has been proposed as one path toward sustainable development. Meanwhile, critics of ecosystem services question if the approach can account for the multiple values of ecosystems to diverse groups of people, or for aspects of inter- and intra-generational justice. In particular, an ecosystem service approach often overlooks power dimensions and capabilities that are core to environmental justice. This article addresses the need for greater guidance on incorporating justice into ecosystem services research and practice. We point to the importance of deep engagement with stakeholders and rights holders to disentangle contextual factors that moderate justice outcomes on ecosystem service attribution and appropriation in socio-political interventions. Such a holistic perspective enables the integration of values and knowledge plurality for enhancing justice in ecosystem services research. This broadened perspective paves a way for transformative ecosystem service assessments, management, and research, which can help inform and design governance structures that nourish human agency to sustainably identify, manage, and enjoy ecosystem services for human wellbeing.

Governance Innovations for forest ecosystem service provision - Insights from an EU-wide survey.

This paper analyses the occurrence of governance innovations for forest ecosystem service (FES) provision in the forestry sector in Europe and the factors that influence innovation development. Based on a European-wide online survey, public and private forest owners and managers representing different property sizes indicate what type of governance innovation activities they engage in, and why. To investigate forestry innovations as systems, the analysis focuses on biophysical, social and technical factors influencing innovation development. The results of our exploratory quantitative analysis show that most innovation activities identified are largely oriented towards biomass production. Accordingly, most forest owners implement efficiency-driven optimisation strategies for forest management and technological improvement for provisioning service supply, to generate income. In contrast, the provision of regulating and cultural services is not yet a prominent part of forestry innovation activities.Reasons are rooted in a market-oriented economic rationale focusing on timber production, a lack of financial resources to compensate for other FES provisions or institutions to provide backup and security to forest owners and managers for engaging in innovation development. Given that the provision of a wide range of FES is a politically well-established objective for forest management in Europe, a strategy is needed that helps to align actors and sectors for supporting and co-financing related forest management approaches and business models. The current revision of the forest related policy framework on EU level under the EU Green deal poses a window of opportunity for better fostering novel governance approaches for more sustainable FES provision.

Participatory research in times of COVID-19 and beyond: Adjusting your methodological toolkits.

Solving grand environmental societal challenges calls for transdisciplinary and participatory methods in social-ecological research. These methods enable co-designing the research, co-producing the results, and co-creating the impacts together with concerned stakeholders. COVID-19 has had serious impacts on the choice of research methods, but reflections on recent experiences of "moving online" are still rare. In this perspective, we focus on the challenge of adjusting different participatory methods to online formats used in five transdisciplinary social-ecological research projects. The key added value of our research is the lessons learned from a comparison of the pros and cons of adjusting a broader set of methods to online formats. We conclude that combining the adjusted online approaches with well-established face-to-face formats into more inclusive hybrid approaches can enrich and diversify the pool of available methods for postpandemic research. Furthermore, a more diverse group of participants can be engaged in the research process.

Fair payments for effective environmental conservation.

Global efforts for biodiversity protection and land use-based greenhouse gas mitigation call for increases in the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental conservation. Incentive-based policy instruments are key tools for meeting these goals, yet their effectiveness might be undermined by such factors as social norms regarding whether payments are considered fair. We investigated the causal link between equity and conservation effort with a randomized real-effort experiment in forest conservation with 443 land users near a tropical forest national park in the Vietnamese Central Annamites, a global biodiversity hotspot. The experiment introduced unjustified payment inequality based on luck, in contradiction of local fairness norms that were measured through responses to vignettes. Payment inequality was perceived as less fair than payment equality. In agreement with our preregistered hypotheses, participants who were disadvantaged by unequal payments exerted significantly less conservation effort than other participants receiving the same payment under an equal distribution. No effect was observed for participants advantaged by inequality. Thus, equity effects on effort can have consequences for the effectiveness and efficiency of incentive-based conservation instruments. Furthermore, we show that women exerted substantially more conservation effort than men, and that increasing payment size unexpectedly reduced effort. This emphasizes the need to consider social comparisons, local equity norms, and gender in environmental policies using monetary incentives to motivate behavioral change.