Ecosystem Services

NESP engages both public and private individuals and organizations to enhance collaboration within the ecosystem services community, including on nature-based solutions. It aims to strengthen coordination of policy, market implementation, and research at the national level.

The Nicholas Institute, partnering with The Harte Research Institute and The Nature Conservancy, works to standardize metrics of restoration success by developing ecosystem service logic models with stakeholders from the five Gulf states, federal agencies, and technical experts.

The North Carolina Natural and Working Lands Action Plan, part of the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, was created in response to Executive Order 80 to identify opportunities for North Carolina’s natural and working lands.

Pocosins are a unique type of wetland found in the North Carolina coastal plain. They provide valuable wildlife habitat and store large amounts of carbon in their deep peat soils. There is increasing interest in pocosin restoration as a nature-based solution that will benefit both natural ecosystems and people.

Natural capital accounting is a method of assessing natural ecosystems’ contributions to the economy in order to help governments better understand their economies’ reliance upon natural systems.

Increasingly, restoration funders and practitioners are paying attention to how coastal restoration projects affect people and communities.The GEMS project identified metrics for social and economic outcomes of coastal restoration, including employment, local economy, recreation, food provision, and mental health benefits. We are now working to apply the GEMS methods for assessing fishing and related outcomes to support restoration decisions made by NOAA’s Damage Assessment Remediation and Restoration (DARRP).

The Bridge Collaborative drove a fundamental shift in how we think, plan, fund and work across sectors to make bigger change faster. We united people and organizations in health, development and the environment with the evidence and tools to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges—from air pollution and poverty, to biodiversity loss and malnutrition, to climate change and inequality. Because there’s only one way to solve the most critical problems we face: Together.

Conservation organizations and land trusts in North Carolina are increasingly focused on how their work can 1) contribute to humans’ and ecosystems’ resilience and adaptation to climate change, and 2) directly mitigate climate change through carbon storage and sequestration.

NESP has created a set of resources for the natural resource management community which are intended to establish an ecosystem services framework that is flexible, while being standardized, intuitive, and credible.

Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, in collaboration with the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center, is engaged in a project to map ecosystem services at the landscape level across the southeastern United States.

The Nicholas Institute collaborated with the US Department of Agriculture to identify datasets ready to use in a national assessment of natural and working lands benefits and to highlight data gaps and limitations.

The NC Natural and Working Lands Action Plan quantifies the current and potential benefits from forests, farmlands, and wetlands in the state. To make this information more accessible, the Nicholas Institute has developed informational online dashboards.

Estuarine ecosystems are areas of immense ecological importance and provide numerous social, economic, and environmental benefits to people.

In partnership with a number of federal agencies, NESP developed an online guidebook for incorporating ecosystem services into agency planning processes.