Ecosystem services and trade-offs: implications for land dynamics and sustainable livelihoods in Northern Lombok, Indonesia

Integrating ecosystem services assessments into policy decision making is a challenging process. Translated into rural development, such a process must address ecosystem services and economic well-being as articulated by a diversity of stakeholders involved. We demonstrate such an effort employed for the first time in the northern Lombok region, Indonesia, where increasingly tense human–nature relationships threaten traditional livelihoods. In close collaboration with multiple stakeholders, our approach weds qualitative scenarios of social-environmental conditions in 2011 to various evidence and models in order to generate quantitative outcomes in 2031 for carbon storage, water yield, and terrestrial economy as conditioned by the amount and location of land changes. Relative to the reference case, two development scenarios show trade-offs between terrestrial economic returns (an increase by 0.5 and 85.4%) and carbon storage (a decrease by 15 and 9.2%, respectively). The approach permits transparent assessments of the trade-offs between the environment and economy based on scenarios employed, and proved useful for decision making and policies.