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To combat land degradation and deterioration issues, the Grain to Green project (GGP) was implemented on the Chinese Loess Plateau in 1999 and substantially altered the land cover by converting slope farmland into forest and grassland. To effectively achieve sustainable land restoration management and avoid stakeholder conflicts, this study aimed to understand how local stakeholders perceived the current land restoration process and expectations for future land restoration policy, as well as how stakeholders assessed the GGP impacts on local ecosystem service changes. We investigated the perspectives of 150 stakeholders representing five stakeholder groups including farmers, governmental officers, citizens, tourism operators and forestry practitioners using questionnaires administered in 2021 in the Yan’an area of the Chinese Loess Plateau. The survey results indicated a 72% support rate of stakeholders for the current GGP, with government officers reporting the highest value and tourism practitioners reporting the lowest. The support rate for future land restoration decreased to 51%. While majority of the stakeholders considered that the GGP had stimulated regulation and cultural ecosystem services, they also perceived negative impacts on grain production, livestock production, water yield and water quantity. Factors influencing farmers’ decision-making on recultivating the restored forest in the future were found to be economically driven. We recommend policy makers to improve the compensation standards and duration for farmers and increase the diversity of restoration tree species, and the involvement of participatory processes is suggested for future land restoration policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid and periodic assessment of the impact of land cover changes on ecosystem services at regional levels is essential to understanding services and sustainability of ecosystems. This study focused on quantifying and assessing changes of multiple ecosystem services in the Sanjiang Plain of China as a result of land cover changes over the period of 1992–2012. This region is important for its large area of natural wetlands and intensive agriculture. The ecosystem services that were assessed for this region included its regulating services (water yield and ecosystem carbon stocks), supporting services (suitable waterbird habitats), and provisioning services (food production), and the approach to the assessment was composed of the surface energy balance algorithms for land (SEBAL), soil survey re-sampling method and an empirical waterbird habitat suitability model. This large scale and integrated investigation represents the first systematic evaluation on the status of ecosystem carbon stocks in the Sanjiang Plain in addition to the development of an effective model for analysis of waterbird habitat suitability with the use of both remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS). More importantly, the result from this study has confirmed trade-offs between ecosystem services and negative consequences to environment in this region. The trade-offs were typically manifested by increased water yield and significantly grown food production, which is in contrast with significant losses in ecosystem carbon stocks (− 14%) and suitable waterbird habitats (− 23%) mainly due to the conversion of land cover from wetland to farmland. This finding implies that land use planning and policy making for this economically important region should take ecosystem service losses into account in order to preserve its natural ecosystems in the best interest of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Although ecosystem services have been identified to be declining over the previous decades, there is no clear methodology of evaluating the impacts of land use change on ecosystem services. This paper presents a methodology for quantifying and assessing changes in multiple ecosystems services as a result of land use change using the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model. The model was used to map and quantify biodiversity and four ecosystem services for Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire for 2000, 2005 and 2009 land use conditions: water yield, carbon storage, nutrient retention, and sediment retention. The study developed a suite of indices to analyze land use change impacts on the status, change and spatial patterns of multiple ecosystem services. On a national scale, the results show a mix of increases in service (water yield, N retention and P retention in Ghana, and, N and P retention in Cote d’Ivoire), little change in services (sediment retention in Ghana and sediment retention and water yield in Cote d’Ivoire) and decreases in services (biodiversity and carbon storage in both countries) from 2000 to 2009. The assessment illustrates a methodology that can be employed by land managers in exploring multiple management scenarios and their implications for multiple ecosystem services change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Sensitivity, dependency and adaptation capacity determine social vulnerability • Social vulnerability to changes in surface water supply is evaluated • Low income and low economic activities diversification increase vulnerability • Stronger institutions and higher economic diversification reduce vulnerability • Evaluating social vulnerability is demanding in information quantity and quality The understanding of how socio-ecological systems respond to environmental change is an essential issue in land use planning processes. Vulnerability analyses in the context of socio-ecological systems are a useful tool to this end. The study of social vulnerability seeks to analyze how the characteristics of beneficiaries of ecosystem services and their relation to the ecosystems, determine their sensitivity and their capacity to adapt to changes in the provision of said services. In this paper, we evaluate the social vulnerability of rural communities in the face of changes in the levels of the provision of surface water in the Riogrande basin, which is located in the Northern Andes in Colombia. Social vulnerability is evaluated based on two components. First, the initial, inherent vulnerability, which depends on parameters such as current level and the change in the level of benefits, types of needs met by the ecosystem service analyzed, and the capacity for substitution. The second component is the final, inherent vulnerability that considers the beneficiary's adaptive capacity determined by individual and institutional characteristics. The information was collected through semi-structured interviews and site-level surveys, as well as the use of available existing data for the area of study. The results show that beneficiaries of the ecosystem service which was analyzed have a low vulnerability to changes in the levels of water supply given their high substitution capacities and medium-high adaptive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]