Global scale prediction of ecosystem services to inform international policy

Area characterisation: 

Global land use and ecosystem models were used at a resolution of 0.5° cells to identify areas of potential synergetic implementation of biodiversity conservation or climate mitigation and adaptation. The results can be aggregated for any polygon entered to the  online tool. With respect to the spatial resolution of the data, we encourage aggregation on continental to national scale, but not below.

Objective: 

This study aims to identify and communicate areas and management solutions that synergistically support biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, as well as the growing demand to feed an increasing global population, using the ecosystem services concept.

Potential impacts/benefits: 
  • This exemplar developed a prototype online application that allows spatial and temporal queries on the provisioning and value of ecosystem services under policy scenarios related to the pressures. These queries provide an uncomplicated way to obtain data as well as summary statistics for self-defined areas.
Transferability of the result: 

We provide an easy-to-use tool that visualises ecosystem services at different scales and for multiple policy scenarios. The information can help policy-decision processes at international level. It can contribute to the unification of biodiversity protection and climate change mitigation communities and can facilitate the identification of multiple goal solutions.

Lessons learned: 

Stakeholders often rely on multiple sources of information. Therefore a visualisation tool is helpful when providing ready-to-use graphical and tabular output about ecological consequences of available global policy scenarios within in one place.~