Ecosystem services research has traditionally emphasized the essential role of healthy ecosystems in supporting human well-being by showcasing the critical benefits they provide, such as clean air and fertile soil. While this research has been important to communicating these benefits and even creating market-based solutions to sustain them, it often neglects a key element: the social dimensions of equity, justice, and resource distribution. Without addressing how ecosystem benefits are shared among diverse stakeholders, it becomes difficult to ensure fair outcomes, particularly for historically underserved communities.
In Mapping Ecosystem Benefit Flows To Normalize Equity, authors Keith H. Hirokawa, Cinnamon P. Carlarne, Karrigan S. Börk, and Sonya Ziaja advocate for an approach that maps “ecosystem services benefit flows” to help pinpoint who benefits from specific ecosystem functions and identify areas where essential ecosystem structures should be preserved. The authors argue that this information can serve as a powerful and actionable tool for driving meaningful change and helping impacted communities. The article was originally published in Arizona State’s Law Journal in 2023. This piece was also selected as a top 20 article for the Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review in 2023, an ELI-Vanderbilt Law School project that identifies innovative environmental law and policy proposals each year.
The authors explain that mapping ecosystem benefit flows connects areas where ecosystem services are produced with the places where these benefits are needed or enjoyed. By spatially cataloging supply and demand, this approach provides communities with baseline data to track gains or losses in ecosystem benefits over time. It also helps reveal patterns in how services flow, whether following natural paths, like watersheds, or existing in place, like shade from trees. This information allows for more targeted conservation and resource management.
The authors argue that benefit flows mapping can be a powerful equity tool, empowering communities who traditionally have had little control over the ecosystem services decisionmaking that significantly impacts them. Benefit flow mapping can illustrate “how power is distributed and where pivotal points of opportunity to redistribute ecosystem assets exist,” providing stakeholders with easily accessible and visually compelling illustrations of how these benefits are distributed.
The authors use the example of flood control, a vital service of watersheds, to illustrate how ecosystem services operate in practice. In a watershed, the flow of flood control services typically moves from upstream areas (such as forests and wetlands) to downstream urban communities. While the more rural, upstream areas may benefit from land management practices that mitigate flooding, downstream communities often experience the worst impacts of floods but have little control over upstream decisions. By visualizing how benefits (like flood control) and disservices (like flooding) flow through the watershed, it becomes easier to see where equity issues arise. This enables communities to better understand local needs, engage in discussions about priorities and trade-offs, and advocate for more equitable resource allocation.
In their article, the authors acknowledge that benefit flow mapping is likely to face challenges related to local environmental governance, including lack of scientific/institutional capacity, lack of funding, and scale issues. When asked for a comment on how to best tackle these challenges in the context of the 2024 political landscape, they explained: “The best way to overcome the capacity issues we identified is to strengthen academic engagement and assistance for local issues, whether that is through continued work in the extensions or, in the waning days of the Biden Administration, at least making sure that mapping tools are housed at multiple institutions so that they remain available to the public, and aren't hidden the way that EPA pages suddenly were back in 2017.” They emphasize that “supporting local environmental efforts just got more pressing. State and local governments are very dependent on federal grants and related partnerships with universities to do the kind of work we discussed, not to mention access to environmental and equity mapping tools from the federal government.”
Ultimately, despite the challenges associated with its implementation, benefit flows mapping can help promote equitable and sustainable resource allocation and foster more effective, inclusive ecosystem management. By operationalizing this mapping through existing environmental law tools and fostering public-private partnerships, communities can empower themselves to advocate for fairer resource distribution and better management of natural systems.