Incentives, land use, and ecosystem services: Synthesizing complex linkages

Incentive schemes are increasingly used to motivate the supply of ecosystem services from agro-ecosystems through changes in land use and management. Here, I synthesize the complex effects of incentives on ecosystem services through their influence on land use and management. Linkages between incentives and land use change, and between land use change and ecosystem services can be one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. Change in land use and management can affect multiple ecosystem services, with both co-benefits and trade-offs. Incentives can motivate multiple changes in land use and management and multiple incentives often interact with both synergies and tensions in their effect upon ecosystem services. These vary over both space and time, and can be non-linear. Depending on incentive design, changes in ecosystem service supply can also have a feedback effect on incentive prices. I suggest that continued quantitative development is required to further explore these linkages: in the influence of incentives on land use change; in the impact of land use change on ecosystem services, and; in ecosystem service supply feedbacks on incentive prices. Quantifying and understanding these linkages is essential to progress more comprehensive analyses of the impact of incentives on ecosystem services, and the design of incentives capable of realizing synergies and avoiding tensions.