This case study quantifies ecosystem services in several land use scenarios, relative to actual land use change, over a nine-year period. These scenarios were developed in an effort to maintain agricultural production while improving water quality and increasing water quantity in the watershed of the Miyun Reservoir—the only source of surface water currently available for domestic use in Beijing, China.
This report details a framework established by the United States Department of Interior (DOI) to evaluate the success of 162 of its resilience-focused projects. Building on a previous report that developed performance metrics to measure changes in ecological resilience resulting from the projects, this report focuses on the incorporation of metrics to address socio-economic impacts resulting from the DOI-sponsored projects. These metrics will be used to evaluate projects both individually and across larger scales, with the aim to inform best practices, address knowledge gaps, sustain and enhance improvements in coastal resilience, and further community competence and empowerment.
This case study applies an ecosystem services framework to understand how human activities affect the flow of benefits, including models that quantify services provided by corals, mangroves, and seagrasses. This information is then used within an extensive engagement process to design a national spatial plan for Belize's coastal zone. This process makes Belize's coastal spatial plan the first of its kind.
This report represents the first phase of the Department of the Interior (DOI) assessment effort for Hurricane Sandy projects. It was developed for DOI by a metrics expert group of physical and ecological scientists and socioeconomic experts who recommended performance metrics for measuring changes in resilience resulting from the DOI-sponsored projects. It identifies natural and artificial coastal features most affected by Hurricane Sandy along the northeast coast, including marshes, beaches, and estuaries, and recommends metrics that would indicate resilience changes in those features.
This case study analyses multiple ecosystem services provided by the landscape of the Urban Community of Bordeaux, France, between 1990 and 2006 as a result of land use and cover change (LUCC).
This study examines the relationships among attitudes to climate change, risk perceptions, and coping behavioral intentions in different townships of Yunlin County in Taiwan, which has relatively high vulnerability to the consequences of climate change.
This study examines the ecological and socioeconomic effects of the Chinese Natural Forest Conservation Programme (NFCP) and the Grain to Green Programme (GTGP), which initially invested more than US$95 billion in forest conservation and related economic development efforts over thirteen years (1998 to 2010). The NFCP conserves natural forests through logging bans and afforestation with incentives to forest enterprises, whereas the GTGP converts cropland on steep slopes to forest and grassland by providing farmers with grain and cash subsidies.
This case study assesses the efficacy of the Environmental Stewardship scheme in England to drive changes in national farmland bird populations over the period 2002-2010. It tests for associations between environmental stewardship management options, grouped into categories reflecting intended biological effects (e.g. the presence of stubble, or straw that remains after grains have been harvested) and species’ population growth rates, wherever benefits of management might be expected to occur.
This case study calculates a hazard index for every square kilometer of the United States coastline using five sea-level-rise scenarios. This index is then used to identify the most vulnerable people and property as indicated by being in the upper quartile of hazard for the nation’s coastline. The study delivers the first national map of risk reduction owing to natural habitats and thus indicates where conservation and restoration of reefs and vegetation have the greatest potential to protect coastal communities.
This summary reports on a pilot Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) project funded by South West Water in the catchment of the River Fowey in Cornwall. The scheme looks to fund capital investments on farms that will serve to improve water quality in the River Fowey. This report follows and documents the process of designing and implementing the PES scheme as well as providing an evaluation of the successes and failures of that process in order to provide insights into issues that might arise in similar projects across the United Kingdom.