Can recognition of ecosystem services help biodiversity conservation?

Abstract

Key lessons • Ecosystem services thinking explicitly brings farmers and their activity into the framework for decision-making and provides a model communicating the benefits of nature conservation that is effective for some audiences. • Communicating the benefits of ecosystem services to landholders can promote the advantages of nature conservation actions in their landscapes, increasing adoption and community support. • We should not assume that ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation always pull in the same direction for land use decision-making. • Ecosystem services thinking can help to identify stakeholders and beneficiaries in a way that improves policy design. • Management to improve ecosystem services sometimes requires a deeper understanding of ecosystems than we currently have. LEARNING FROM AGRI‑ENvIRONMENT SChEMES IN AUSTRALIA 108 Nature conservation policies have increasingly invoked ecosystem services as part of their rationale. What were formerly biodiversity polices are now increasingly communicated as policies for biodiversity and ecosystem services. Views on this shift range from those who argue that ecosystem services thinking is not particularly useful to conservation policy (e.g. Srivastava and Vellend 2005) through to those who argue that the vision is beginning to have real impact (e.g. Daily et al. 2009). Agri-environment schemes are particularly pertinent in this debate, because they target conservation outcomes in production-oriented landscapes. In this chapter, I examine the extent to which incorporating ecosystem services concepts into policy can affect both the targeting of outcomes and encouraging uptake and engagement in agri-environment schemes. Ecosystem services thinking