About this Research Topic
Globally, there is a substantial need to improve the pace and scale of landscape management to conserve natural resources and limit the negative impacts of climate change. However, the cost of performing such management is often restrictively large, leading to needed work going unfunded. At the same time, landscape management is often crucial for the provision of ecosystem services, including water, carbon sequestration, wood products, and protection from wildfire. Solutions which leverage the provisioning of ecosystem services in order to fund management and maintenance of forested lands include environmental markets and conservation finance.
There is a growing market for ecosystem services, whereby management is funded by beneficiaries of one or several of these services. However, there are still many questions and issues related to functioning environmental markets. Previous work has highlighted potential issues in how environmental markets might exacerbate inequality on the landscape, and so we also invite papers that evaluate the environmental justice aspects of environmental markets. The ultimate goal of this special issue is to advance our understanding of the connection between environmental markets, land management, and sociodemographic outcomes.
This special issue focuses on connecting the management of landscapes to financial markets for ecosystem services in order to increase the pace and scale of management. A broad range of different ecosystem services may be considered, including water, timber, carbon, recreation, and cultural amenities. We seek papers that combine analysis of landscapes, the benefits that landscapes have for communities, and markets that can monetize those benefits into support for landscape management. In addition, we invite papers that consider new and innovative ways of thinking about environmental markets and conservation finance, papers that consider novel approaches to modeling ecosystem service provision and valuation, as well as papers that link landscapes and ecosystems to community outcomes.
There is a growing market for ecosystem services, whereby management is funded by beneficiaries of one or several of these services. However, there are still many questions and issues related to functioning environmental markets. Previous work has highlighted potential issues in how environmental markets might exacerbate inequality on the landscape, and so we also invite papers that evaluate the environmental justice aspects of environmental markets. The ultimate goal of this special issue is to advance our understanding of the connection between environmental markets, land management, and sociodemographic outcomes.
This special issue focuses on connecting the management of landscapes to financial markets for ecosystem services in order to increase the pace and scale of management. A broad range of different ecosystem services may be considered, including water, timber, carbon, recreation, and cultural amenities. We seek papers that combine analysis of landscapes, the benefits that landscapes have for communities, and markets that can monetize those benefits into support for landscape management. In addition, we invite papers that consider new and innovative ways of thinking about environmental markets and conservation finance, papers that consider novel approaches to modeling ecosystem service provision and valuation, as well as papers that link landscapes and ecosystems to community outcomes.
Keywords: Socioeconomic Impacts, Environmental Markets, Payments for Ecosystem Services, Forest Management, Socioecology, Forest Disturbances
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