Integrate ecosystem services into socio-economic development to enhance achievement of sustainable development goals in the post-pandemic era

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has stalled and rolled back progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ecosystem services (ESs), defined as the contributions of ecosystems to human well-being, underpin the achievement of SDGs. To promote SDG achievement in post-pandemic era, we teased out the links between ESs and SDGs while examining the impact of COVID-19. We found that ESs benefited all SDGs, yet man-made pressures led to degradation of ecosystems and their services. There is broad consensus that the virus lurks in degraded ecosystems and generates spillover due to human interference. The pandemic and global lockdown/restriction disrupted the flow of ESs and altered human ESs demand, threatening the efforts for the SDGs. We suggested: 1) to study the association and traceability of ESs-SDGs under the pandemic; 2) to prioritize pressing issues such as health care, livelihood, and resource security and in the long run, we should promote human-nature harmony to achieve the SDGs; and 3) to enhance ESs and to promote the SDGs through local community efforts, ESs accounting, and ecosystem restoration. This paper provides insights into the importance of ESs to the SDGs and the ways to integrate ESs into socio-economic development to promote the SDG achievement after the pandemic.

Keywords

Ecosystem services (ESs) / Sustainable development goals (SDGs) / COVID-19 pandemic / Socio-economic development / Human-nature relationship

Declaration of interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41861134038, Grant No. 41771197), Norwegian Research Council (Grant No. 286773), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: 10.1016/j.geosus.2021.03.002.

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