Ecosystem services-based decision-making: A bridge from science to practice

Ecosystem services (ES) clarifies nature's contribution to human in an intuitive way, and aims at fully recognizing the importance of nature in the decision-making of social-ecological system management. However, in order to improve the ability of ES to guide decision-making in practice, the ES-based decision-making (ESDM) needs to be further explored. Thus, this study summarized the connotation of ESDM, and clarified development approach of ESDM. Further, the ESDM framework was demonstrated in a structured approach. The results showed that although ESDM has been developing rapidly, the key components of ESDM have not been fully integrated in decision-making practice. This framework integrated key ES components (ES supply-demand, flow, disservice, stakeholders, tradeoff, and feedback) with their correlations and decision makers. The ESDM framework includes five components: ES supply assessment, stakeholder identification and ES demand assessment, ES flow path identification, target selection and multi-dimensional tradeoff, and decision-making and adaptive feedback. This ESDM framework enriches the multi-dimensional tradeoff of stakeholders’ preference facing the ES delivery process, and provides comprehensive and scientific information for social-ecological system decision-making. The key issues that should be further investigated in ESDM are the mediating factors of ES flow, fairness among stakeholders, and multi-dimensional targets integration in decision-making. The important approaches for improving the efficiency and operability of ESDM include improving the ES assessment precision and strengthening spatial-temporal scale coupling analysis.