Despite growing awareness of the importance of ecosystem services in supporting human well-being, conservationists are rarely able to provide policy-makers with robust information about the overall consequences of land use decisions. Existing locally-relevant data are too patchy and the methods, skills and resources needed to collect new information are typically unavailable. To address this issue, a consortium of organisations (under the umbrella of CCI) has developed an ecosystem services ‘toolkit’ that measures multiple services delivered by a site. The toolkit can demonstrate the ‘added value’ that high biodiversity sites often provide in terms of human well-being benefits. These benefits may occur at the local, national or global scale. It therefore promotes a better understanding of the social, political and economic factors related to site conservation and what could be done to achieve better outcomes for both biodiversity and human livelihoods.
This project was funded by the CCI Collaborative Fund for Conservation.
