Designing a Sustainability Assessment approach for the provision of Forest Ecosystem Services

Forests offer a wide range of goods and services that are essential to human well-being and society. Given that forests are degrading at an alarming rate worldwide, its sustainable management remains a subject of ongoing debate. Meanwhile, sustainability assessments are meant to support decision-makers in making sustainable choices. However, few studies have been done in integrating the ecosystem services concept as a means to communicate the importance of forests in sustainability assessments. This dissertation successively develops a sustainability assessment approach for forests in four articles. The first article is a conflict analysis that investigates stakeholders’ competing interests for forest resources. The second article is a literature review that looks into the extent to which the ecosystem services concept has been used for sustainability assessments applied to forest ecosystems in peer reviewed scientific articles. The third article explores how market-based instruments, particularly payments-for-ecosystem services (PES), are utilized in the European Green Deal as a means to address market failure. The last article is a literature review that assesses how the transdisciplinary approach is used in Biosphere Reserves, as model regions for sustainable development, in the Global South. The findings are then synthesized into a sustainability assessment methodology for forest ecosystems. This methodology follows a nested systems approach and recommends prioritizing forest health and functioning to improve the delivery of ecosystem services, employing participatory and transdisciplinary approaches in forest management, and utilizing payments-for-ecosystem services to address market failure towards regulating and cultural ecosystem services.