Gaming to better manage complex natural resource landscapes

Forested and agroforestry landscapes stand at a crossroads. The combined and interacting effects of land-use change, resource extraction, defaunation and climate change are pushing these ecosystems towards critical points where transitions to altered states will happen. With the livelihoods of millions of mainly smallholder farmers directly depending on these landscapes and at the same time representing large conservation and commercial interests, these landscapes are heavily contested. The large number of conflicting interests and stakeholder perspectives, the interconnections, time lags, uncertainties and non-linearities that characterize these systems make steering them extremely challenging. The future of these landscapes largely depends on our shared capacity to understand and anticipate these transitions. Ecosystem services are part of the language and concepts used to understand the relations between the interests of various stakeholders