Incentivizing the production of ecosystem services on working lands: The opportunities and challenges of funding “nature’s contributions to people” in the U.S. Northeast

Abstract

In the coming decades, promoting the production of ecosystem service provisioning will become increasingly important in the U.S. Northeast, which is expected to experience a number of impacts as a result of climate change, including rising temperatures, changes in precipitation and seasonality, and sea-level rise, among others (U.S. Global Change Research Program 2020). Incentives have been shown to motivate the adoption of sustainable production practices that provision ecosystem services across different types of working landscapes. Using data from a recent landscape assessment in the Northeast, this paper finds an incredible breadth of programs available to producers across a variety of working landscapes (e.g., agricultural lands and working forests) and for different production practices. These data also point to critical gaps in current programming and also highlight important opportunities for programmatic synergy and more holistic program design going forward. This paper concludes by discussing the results in the context of four main themes of particular relevance to the U.S. Northeast which include (1) working landbase and infrastructure, (2) livelihood provisioning, (3) scale, and (4) resilience.

Keywords

• agriculture
• aquaculture
• ecosystem services
• forestry
• incentive programs
• livelihoods
• urban-to-rural gradient
• working lands and landscapes