Ecosystem Services Provisioning from Land

Dear Colleagues,

Ecosystem services are much studied and there is growing interest in the future global trends in population pressure, demographics (like mass migration and aging), climate change, economics, geopolitics, the UN SDGs. We are interested in projecting current trajectories into the future past 2030 past 2050. We see that continued provisioning of ecosystems goods and services will become an enormous challenge. We invite people with views and ideas about these matters to join us and contribute to the Special Issue of Land.

Soils have been the basis of our food supply since the dawn of agriculture; they also provide other “free” ecosystem services such as regulating water and nutrient availability, and are the largest single store of terrestrial carbon, regulating the climate. In the past, as soils came under pressure from nutrient depletion, erosion, and/or salinity accumulation, farmers moved on or invested effort to restore productivity to the extent that income from this could profitably cover the cost of the desired food and fiber etc., but not the other “free” ecosystems services. It is now widely recognized that this practice of “moving on” is no longer realistically possible, and that additional investment is required to reverse the decline and other unfunded ecosystem services, collectively referred to as ecosystem goods and services (EG&S).

There are a number of market failures here that are addressed in this Special Issue of Land:

• A poor capacity to connect markets for these other services (buyers of carbon and bio-diversity credits, etc.) to the land users who can produce them, and to monitor and account for the transactions to buyers to mediate supply.
• The slow dissemination of knowledge of how these ecosystems services are monetized is also relevant to the production of ecosystem goods, food, and fiber, etc., and case studies of successful applications of relevant technology to many land users who might take them up.
• A poor capacity to develop and successfully communicate policy incentives and market systems relevant to the socio-cultural and institutional circumstance of many areas where these might be produced, or their production increased.

Some discussion points that might generate a paper!

• Describing the connections between marketable ecosystem goods; food and fiber etc. and the other “free” ecosystem services available in different land systems; arable dry and irrigated lands, dry pastures, grasslands, and arid lands mediated by livestock and other income sources, and conceptual ways to value these EG&S.
• Describing successful case studies of activities to rehabilitate land for EG&S in different land systems.
• Developing or reporting on institutional processes and incentives to plan, mobilize, and effectively monitor rehabilitation plans and resources from international to regional and local levels where action is to take place, in different socio-cultural and institutional circumstances. These could serve as a series of primers for interested international financial institutions, the private sector, and specialized ecosystem merchants.
• Identifying and discussing key driving forces, trade-offs, and synergies of ecosystem services.
• Discussing the vulnerability of ecosystem services provisioning to the spread of urbanization.

Dr. Victor Squires
Prof. Dr. John Leake
Prof. Dr. Haiying Feng
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• ecosystem goods and services (EG&S)
• soil
• agriculture
• carbon
• bio-diversity
• ecosystem goods
• ecosystem food
• fiber
• policy incentives
• socio-cultural
• institutional circumstance
• stakeholders
• monetization
• livelihoods