When we cannot have it all: Ecosystem services trade-offs in the context of spatial planning

Spatial planning has to deal with trade-offs between various stakeholders wishes and needs as part of planning and management of landscapes, natural resources and/or biodiversity. To make ecosystem services (ES) trade-off research more relevant for spatial planning, we propose an analytical framework, which puts stakeholders, their land-use/management choices, their impact on ES and responses at the centre. Based on 24 cases from around the world, we used this framing to analyse the appearance and diversity of real-world ES trade-offs. They cover a wide range of trade-offs related to ecosystem use, including: land-use change, management regimes, technical versus nature-based solutions, natural resource use, and management of species. The ES trade-offs studied featured a complexity that was far greater than what is often described in the ES literature. Influential users and context setters are at the core of the trade-off decision-making, but most of the impact is felt by non-influential users. Provisioning and cultural ES were the most targeted in the studied trade-offs, but regulating ES were the most impacted. Stakeholders characteristics, such as influence, impact faced, and concerns can partially explain their position and response in relation to trade-offs. Based on the research findings, we formulate recommendations for spatial planning. (c) 2017This research was made possible by funds of the European Union EU FP7 project OpenNESS (Grant agreement no. 308428 ). The OpenNESS project is solely responsible for the content of this publication. It does not represent the opinion of the European Union, nor is the European Union responsible for any use that might be made of information appearing herein. For the case study research, additional funds were available from the Spanish National Institute for Agriculture and Food Research and Technology , the Social European Fund (Doc-INIA CCAA), NSF Idaho EPSCoR Program , National Science Foundation (USA) under award number IIA-1301792, the Andalusian Center for the Assessment of Global Change (GLOCHARID Project, 2014), the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs (KB-24-003-012), NGOs Fund in Romania, EEA Financial Mechanism 2009-2014, Ecoplan project (FBO-SBO, Belgium), Flemish Fund for Rural Development (Belgium), the Argentinian Institute of Agricultural Technology ( INTA ), and the Research Institute for Nature and Forest ( INBO ) (Belgium)