Reasons and options for integrating ecosystem services in strategic environmental assessment of spatial planning

Despite the attention that research on ecosystem services has attracted in recent years, its use to support real-life decision-making processes is still very limited, especially at the planning level. Spatial planning results in actions that may affect the distribution and quality of a wide range of ecosystem services. Hence, spatial planning decisions would benefit from systematic considerations of their effects on ecosystem services. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) provides an excellent platform to this purpose. This paper aims at providing insights on why it is important to promote ecosystem service-inclusive SEA processes, and on how to do it, with particular emphasis on spatial planning. First, possible actions to include relevant information of ecosystem services throughout the SEA process are presented. Second, the advantages are discussed by considering both the characteristics of ecosystem services approaches and the criteria of good-quality SEA. Finally, four main challenges are identified, concerning scoping, scale issues, trade-offs, and indicators, respectively. Addressing these challenges is bound to produce more effective SEA processes and better planning decisions.