The protection of ecosystem services is one of the key values underlying the establishment and management of protected areas. Yet, these services are rarely quantified rigorously, and the full value of protected area benefits thus are not well understood. A better understanding of ecosystem services is critical for including them in the management and planning of protected areas. In addition, many ecosystem services, such as flood risk reduction benefits, could provide novel funding avenues for protected areas that are typically underfunded. Our study quantifies the spatial distribution of flood reduction benefits provided by mangroves within protected areas. We find that 55% of mangrove protected areas provide flood risk reduction benefits with a combined value of US$27.4 billion in infrastructure and 6.1 million people annually. The distribution of these benefits varies across geographic areas as well as protected area governance and protection levels. Among governance types, government protected areas protect the largest number of people and property. By protection level, protected areas with lower levels of protection protect the highest number of people, indicating a high benefit to people from these protected areas. Highly restricted protected areas protect the highest amount of infrastructure and have the highest per km2 value for both people and infrastructure. In addition, we quantify the benefits of unprotected mangrove areas at national levels indicating the potential for including risk reduction benefits in future mangrove conservation efforts.
Changes in vegetation structure, composition, and distribution are among the most consequential drivers of land–atmosphere interactions and associated ecosystem services. Vegetation–climate modelling frameworks often rely on temperature-based indicators, most commonly near-surface temperature, and in some cases land surface temperature, as primary outcome metrics. This commentary argues that many policy interpretations extend beyond the scope of typical vegetation–climate modelling frameworks by treating temperature responses as comprehensive indicators of climate effectiveness or broader ecosystem-service outcomes, thereby risking maladaptive policy decisions. We emphasize that these concerns do not undermine the scientific value of these modelling studies. Rather, they highlight the pressing need to interpret model outputs as conditional diagnostics that should be considered alongside broader ecosystem-service tradeoffs, ecological feedbacks, and human impacts.
Environmental Accounting Frameworks (EAFs) have expanded rapidly across public policy, corporate reporting, and sustainability governance, reflecting growing demand for integrating environmental information into decision making. Despite substantial conceptual development and increasing institutional uptake, existing research offers limited insight into how these frameworks are operationalised in practice or how they can interoperate across institutional domains. As a result, environmental accounting continues to exhibit limited operational coherence and weak interoperability, constraining comparability, policy integration, and the effective reuse of environmental accounts. Addressing this gap, this article provides a systematic and empirically validated review of EAFs, with a specific focus on operationalisation and interoperability. The study pursues four objectives: (i) to map and categorise EAFs with demonstrable institutional relevance; (ii) to define and validate criteria for assessing their operational maturity; (iii) to identify structural and methodological barriers limiting implementation and cross framework interoperability; and (iv) to explore pathways for advancing an agenda of operational harmonisation.Methodologically, the study adopts a triangulated mixed methods design combining systematic literature and institutional review, qualitative comparative analysis, and structured expert validation. Triangulation integrates documentary evidence, structured analytical comparison, and expert judgement drawn from both academic and applied domains, strengthening methodological robustness and limiting disciplinary bias. The article contributes to environmental accounting scholarship by shifting attention from conceptual proliferation toward operational integration. For policymakers and statistical authorities, it provides guidance for aligning environmental accounts across governance levels. For standard setting bodies and corporate reporting actors, it identifies actionable pathways to enhance data interoperability and reporting coherence. For researchers, it offers a validated analytical framework to support more operationally grounded and policy relevant environmental accounting research.
Traditional rural wood-pastures are threatened by the loss of wild herbivory and traditional agro-silvo-pastoral practices, promoting woody encroachment, habitat homogenization, and erosion of biodiversity and cultural values. Megaherbivore rewilding has been proposed as a strategy to restore disturbance regimes in these semi-natural landscapes, but its socioecological implications remain uncertain. Using Italy as a representative case study, we reconstructed an early-Holocene, pre-agricultural baseline from fossil records to identify candidate megaherbivores for reintroduction across Alpine, Continental, and Mediterranean biogeographical regions. We compared extant and potential assemblages in functional diversity, vegetation consumption, grazing–browsing balance, and seed-dispersal potential, assessed the sensitivity of conservation-priority habitats to increased herbivory, and reviewed literature through a SWOT analysis of ecosystem services and disservices. The potential assemblage comprised ten species, including extant, range-restricted, new-native, and extinct taxa. Reintroductions would generate uneven functional gains, with limited change in the Alpine region but stronger expansion in the Continental and especially Mediterranean regions, where functional dispersion would increase from 0.46 to 0.64 and vegetation consumption from 4.45 to 10.58 t km−2 yr−1. Rewilding may shift assemblages toward grazing, potentially helping to limit woody encroachment and reduce fuel loads, but increasing risks for habitats with low-to-moderate herbivory requirements. The SWOT analysis highlighted opportunities for nature-based tourism, rural livelihoods, damage-prevention measures, and integrated wildlife–livestock–human health surveillance, alongside threats related to crop damage, disease transmission, road collisions, management costs, and social conflict. Overall, megaherbivore rewilding should be regarded as a context-dependent restoration strategy requiring spatially explicit planning, density thresholds, and participatory governance.
