Balancing Competing Grassland Ecosystem Services Requires Intensive Stakeholder Involvement and Actions on Different Spatial Scales

Abstract

Grasslands provide a wide range of different ecosystem services (ES) that are crucial for human well-being. This increases the interest in understanding the drivers of grassland ES to maintain and enhance ES supply for future generations. However, many ES do currently not have a market value and show trade-offs, that is, antagonistic relationships, that are strengthened by management intensification. For example, high forage production is key for farm income, but conflicts with many cultural ES and grassland biodiversity conservation. Balancing these competing services is thus required to ensure ES supply meeting societal demand. This poses the question of how to achieve an economically viable balance in the future. We discuss how involving stakeholders and implementing ES-enhancing actions at landscape, farm and field scales can contribute to tackling this urgent question. First, multi-stakeholder approaches are required to assess prioritisation of ES to understand societal ES demand, design multifunctional landscapes, and motivate and empower farmers to increase insufficiently-supplied ES. Second, information on how management practices change ES and their trade-offs must be available and realistically implementable. Third, different actions to enhance undersupplied ES need to be implemented across spatial scales. These actions must be taken at farm and field but also landscape-scale, which is needed for spatial targeting of different grassland types. We argue that jointly targeting all three spatial scales and intensifying efforts for stakeholder involvement and motivation is crucial for improved ES supply. Our synthesis provides a framework for balancing multiple ES and gives applied examples of how to achieve this.