Research progress on trade-offs and synergies of ecosystem services: An overview

Abstract

Being the core of ecosystem assessment, studies on ecosystem services have been becoming a focus in the field of ecology. The formation and provisioning capacity of ecosystem services are tremendously affected by human activities. Conversely, the magnitudes of ecosystem service changes also influence the preferences of human being's daily decision- making. Investigation into the dynamics of the trade-offs and synergistic relationships of regional ecosystem services will shed light on interactions and feedbacks between ecosystem services and the stakeholders at different spatial and temporal scales, and avoid double-counting issue in ecosystem services assessment. In addition, information and progress on trade- offs and synergies in the delivery of ecosystem services will provide scientific basis for designing and implementing eco- compensation schemes and optimize the management behavior of ecosystem services, and finally improve human well-being associated with trade-offs and synergies among different ecosystem services. It is revealed from this review that in the last decades, the valuation of ecosystem services has been received lots of attentions in the decision-making and scientific research communities. However, the double-counting issue during the valuation process usually leads to insufficient or biased guidance in the management of ecosystem services. Since ecosystem service is benefit that human receives from the natural ecosystems, the stakeholders' demand for ecosystem services from different spatial and temporal scales often causes competitions and conflicts among ecosystem's various goods and services. The interactions between human being and ecosystem services often give rise to trade-offs and synergies which in turn directly affect human welfare. With regard to the terminologies, trade-offs between ecosystem services refers to the enhancement of one ecosystem service locally in a short term is at the cost of other ecosystem services locally or at a large spatial scale (e. g., globally) in the future. It can be simplified as the "win-lose" mode. The term synergies means the synchronous changes between two or among many different ecosystem services, including the "win-win" mode and the "lose-lose" mode. The trade-offs and synergistic relationships exist not only within different categories of provisioning services, but also among different ecosystem services and like provision services, regulation services, cultural services, and supporting services. Findings from about 12 literatures has shown specific examples of such kind of trade-offs and synergistic relations, for instance, among provisioning services, between regulating services and cultural services, between provisioning services and supporting services, among regulating services, and between provisioning services and regulating services. The spatial scale of trade-offs and synergies contain various scales, for instance, from ecological scale to institutional scale. The temporal scale could be short-term to long-term based. This paper indicates that so far, trade-offs and synergies analysis of ecosystem services is still at its early stage. However, we identified and summarized two research approaches which have already been commonly used for the analysis of ecosystem services' trade-offs: (1) the Integrated Ecological-Economic Model: it is a traditional approach which is often used to quantify trade-offs. The Model consists of several ecological and economic models. The ecological models are mostly used to analyze the magnitudes of the changes of ecosystem services, while the economic models to evaluate the impacts of the change on human welfare. Since land use and land cover change serves as a direct driving factor of the ecosystem services' trade-offs and synergies, it will become even more extensive due to intensification of interactions between the two in the future. (2) Scenarios Analysis based on Landuse is attracting more and more attention in scientific literature. Remote sensing data and management policies of ecosystem services provde strong data basis for the scenarios formulation and analysis. It could provide more objective and spatially-explicit information on the trade-offs and synergies for optimizing ecosystem services management.