Ecosystem goods and services have been brought to the forefront of policy making all over the world. It is acknowledged that these goods and services underpin human well-being. The provision of water resources is amongst those services that have raised more attention, given its unquestionable value and global threats like climatic change. Nevertheless, the biophysical basis that determines the land-use/water interactions has been often ignored. For the formulation of sound decisions, it is necessary to extend the empirical basis that determines these complex relations.

The concept of nature as capital is gaining visibility in policies and practices in both the public and private sectors. This change is due to an improved ability to assess and value ecosystem services, as well as to a growing recognition of the potential of an ecosystem services approach to make tradeoffs in decision making more transparent, inform efficient use of resources, enhance resilience and sustainability, and avoid unintended negative consequences of policy actions.

This article addresses the critical need for a better quantitative understanding of how water resources from the Hérault River catchment in France have been influenced by climate variability and the increasing pressure of human activity over the last 50 years. A method is proposed for assessing the relative impacts of climate and growing water demand on the decrease in discharge observed at various gauging stations in the periods 1961–1980 and 1981–2010.

Rapid and periodic assessment of the impact of land cover change and climate variability on ecosystem services at regional levels is essential to understanding services and sustainability of ecosystems. This study focused on quantifying and assessing the changes in multiple ecosystem services in the Three-River Headwaters Region (TRHR), China in 2000–2012.

It is urgent in science and society to address climate change and other sustainability challenges such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, depletion of marine fish stocks, global ill-health, land degradation, land use change and water scarcity. Sustainability science (SS) is an attempt to bridge the natural and social sciences for seeking creative solutions to these complex challenges. In this article, we propose a research agenda that advances the methodological and theoretical understanding of what SS can be, how it can be pursued and what it can contribute.

Effective information regarding environmental responses to future land-use and climate change scenarios provides useful support for decision making in land use planning, management and policies. This study developed an approach for modeling and examining the impacts of future land-use and climate change scenarios on streamflow, surface runoff and groundwater discharge using an empirical land-use change model, a watershed hydrological model based on various land use policies and climate change scenarios in an urbanizing watershed in Taiwan.

This study aimed to assess the degree of potential temperature and precipitation change as predicted by the HadCM3 (Hadley Centre Coupled Model, version 3) climate model for Louisiana, and to investigate the effects of potential climate change on surface soil organic carbon (SOC) across Louisiana using the Rothamsted Carbon Model (RothC) and GIS techniques at the watershed scale.

The implicit hydrologic dimensions of international efforts to mitigate climate change, specifically potential impacts of the Clean Development Mechanism-Afforestation/Reforestation (CDM-AR) provisions of the Kyoto Protocol (KP) on global, regional and local water cycles, are examined. The global impact of the redistribution of water use driven by agriculture and land use change, of which CDM-AR can be a contributing factor, is a major component of ongoing global change and climate change processes.

Capsule The bioclimatic zone and habitat type within which birds winter are the most important determinants of population trends.Aims To investigate whether regional factors on wintering grounds, phenological mismatch, or habitat on breeding or wintering grounds show relationships with population changes of Afro-Palaearctic migrant birds.Methods We modelled breeding bird survey trends of 26 species of Afro-Palaearctic migrant birds that breed in Britain, and assessed the most important variables.

Human land use contributes significantly to the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Changes in land management practices have been proposed as a critical and cost-effective mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting the storage of additional carbon in vegetation and soils. However many discussions of the potential for land use to mitigate climate change only take into account biophysical factors such as vegetation and land cover and neglect how the agency of land owners themselves affects whether additional carbon storage can be achieved.

Climate change in the Mediterranean is expected to lead to lower total rainfall and soil moisture, together with higher storm intensities; different vegetation types are expected to react positively or negatively to these and other changes. Climate change could therefore have positive or negative impacts on runoff and soil erosion during storms, and previous research has indicated that the impacts could be different at the field, hillslope and catchment scales.