Toward principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services

A major challenge of the twenty-first century is ensuring an adequate and reliable flow of essential ecosystem services (ES) to meet the needs of a burgeoning world population. All social-ecological systems (SES) produce a “bundle” of ES, including provisioning (e.g., freshwater, crops, meat), regulating (e.g., flood and climate regulation), and cultural services (e.g., recreation, spiritual values). Extensive and rapid global changes, including urbanization, growing human populations, rising consumption, and increased global connections, have led to a large and growing demand for provisioning services. Meeting these needs has resulted in large-scale conversion of natural ecosystems to cropland, which has eroded the capacity of ecosystems to produce other ES essential to human health and security—especially regulating services. Furthermore, extensive anthropogenic changes to the world's ecosystems are increasing the likelihood of large, nonlinear, and potentially irreversible changes, such as coral reef degradation. Such events often have substantial and sometimes catastrophic impacts on ES and human well-being