Background

Human well-being depends on the maintenance of ecosystem services. Upper tributary watersheds provide diverse services such as water provision, soil renewal for agriculture, mitigation of floods, groundwater recharge, soil erosion control, nutrient abatement and carbon sequestration. However policy-makers have found it hard to find ways of incorporating the benefits derived from ecosystem services into decision making. One reason is the difficulty of characterizing ecosystem services in a manner that policy makers can use it. Another is the challenge of negotiating accountable systems of governance and compensation. Several promising but still insufficiently tested governance mechanisms are being explored, for example, payments for ecological services. All approaches need to consider costs and other disadvantages or risks of ecosystem services conservation to various user groups, and trade-offs intrinsic to ecosystem maintenance. ECOSMAG addresses these pertinent issues by reviewing experiences across a wide range of projects, testing robustness against broad scenarios of future land change, and illustrating solutions and their limitations through three in-depth case studies in China, Indonesia and Thailand. Five research activities will be carried out, namely

1. Stakeholder Analyses- livelihood, access to resources etc
2. Inventory of Ecosystem Services including historical trajectories of state of ecosystem conditions and trends
3. Valuation of Ecosystem Services
4. Modeling and mapping- 1) Production and Flow, and 2) Costs of conservation
5. Governance analyses and influence of change in governance regimes on Ecosystem Services flow to different stakeholders

Focal Ecosystem Services

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