Systematic conservation planning for people and nature: Biodiversity, ecosystem services, and equitable benefit sharing

Including human dimensions in conservation practice is increasingly recognized as being essential for creating sustainable and equitable solutions to the current biodiversity crisis. However, including ecosystem services in conservation planning is challenging because services can be intangible and difficult to map, and incorporating equitable access to the resulting benefits of ecosystem services has hardly been considered. Ecological Infrastructure (EI) is a promising framework for integrating ecosystem services into systematic conservation planning (SCP), yet its application remains to be tested. We aimed to quantify the effects of including EI, with and without equitable access, in a biodiversity-based SCP, where EI is the spatial representation of ecosystem services. We took an experimental, scenario-planning approach, running five scenarios in Marxan software with different combinations of input features: biodiversity (n = 135 features), EI (n = 6) and EI with equitable access (hereafter EI*, n = 84) for the South African coastal zone. The resulting conservation networks were compared using multivariate statistics, considering: the proportion of feature targets met; coverage of core areas (areas with 100 % selection frequency for biodiversity features, EI, and EI*); conservation network size and cost; and spatial configuration. Including biodiversity and equitable access drove the dissimilarity among scenarios, and only when all input features were included, were all core areas well covered and all feature targets met. Therefore, biodiversity features were not an adequate surrogate for EI or EI*, and including ecosystem services (via EI*) in SCP is necessary to ensure equitable access to benefits. However, including EI increased the mean size (7.0 % more planning units) and cost (by 9.1 %) of conservation networks. Despite this, the social and economic benefits of investing in EI (e.g., securing dunes for coastal protection) likely outweigh these costs, especially in the longer term.