The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the global and multi-dimensional nature of sustainability and thus require improving our capacity to articulate and trace the impact of ecosystem change to measures of human well-being. Yet, the integrated nature of these goals is challenging to assess without similarly integrated assessment tools. We present a new modeling toolkit, ‘Mapping Ecosystem Services to Human well-being’ (MESH), that integrates commonly used, stand alone ecosystem services models from the InVEST suite of models to quantify and illustrate the tradeoffs and synergies across five ecosystem services and up to ten associated SDGs. Development of the software and its functionality were informed by a broad stakeholder consultation with ministries, non-governmental organizations and civil society groups in West Africa to identify common barriers to uptake and application of modeling tools in developing countries. In light of this process, key features included in MESH are 1) integration of multiple ecosystem service (ES) models into a common modeling framework supported by a curated base dataset; 2) built-in scenario generation capacity to support policy analysis; 3) visualization of outcomes and tradeoffs, and 4) mapping of ecosystem service change to SDG targets and goals. We illustrate the use of MESH in a case study in the Volta basin of West Africa comparing the effectiveness of three alternative conservation prioritization approaches: (i) land cover-based, (ii) topographic-based and (iii) an ecosystem service-based approach to minimize impact of agricultural expansion. We evaluate these approaches by linking changes in service supply to potential impacts on achievement of specific SDG goals and targets.
https://naturalcapitalproject.stanford.edu/mesh/