Achieving prosperity for all while protecting the environment for future generations is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time, and a central idea in the globally accepted UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To date, this has proved an elusive objective in most parts of the world partly because environmental conservation and improving human well-being are perceived as distinct and often competing agendas. We argue that managing for ecosystem services, which explicitly recognize the tightly coupled relationship between conservation and well-being, is an essential approach for achieving the broad range of goals embodied in the SDGs. When well planned and managed, natural resources and their ecosystem services play an important role in supporting both social and environmental dimensions of development. However, the contributions of ecosystem services often remain unquantified and poorly linked to measures of well-being, leading them to be discounted during decision-making. Despite an acknowledgement of ecosystem services in the language of the SDGs, we currently lack synthesized knowledge clearly articulating where and how ecosystem services contribute to meeting specific and multiple SDGs, and what tools are available to enable use of this information for decision-making.
Results/Conclusions
Here we present the results of a large-scale expert survey on evidence for the contribution and importance of 16 ecosystem services to official SDG targets, and review the capacity of existing modelling tools to evaluate SDG-relevant trade-offs. Experts judged ecosystem services could make contributions to achieving at least 37 targets across 10 SDGs, of which contributions were considered of high importance for attaining 32 targets. Food and water provisioning, habitat & biodiversity maintenance, and erosion control services contributed to the largest number of SDG targets. Proper management of these services offers opportunities for synergistic outcomes across multiple SDGs. Although many modelling tools are able to inform key trade-offs identified by experts, significant gaps exist for evaluating the trade-offs between provisioning services and cultural or regulating services within model platforms. In addition a number of regulating services (pollination, pest control, climate moderation) remain poorly represented within currently available modelling tools leaving them unquantified in many decision-making contexts. Improvements are urgently needed to enable more effective assessments across of a wider range of ecosystem service interactions which are expected to arise during the implementation of the SDGs.