Coggan, Anthea, De Valck, Jeremy, Jarvis, Diane, Graham, Victoria, Pert, Petina L., Huchery, Cindy, and Dyer, Michelle (2026) An ecosystem service value chain for sustainable environmental management. Ambio. (In Press)

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Abstract

Managing ecosystems effectively requires managing the ways in which people interact with them, as opposed to managing ecosystems in isolation. However, management decisions often rely predominantly on biophysical data, leaving socio-economic data on the periphery. The absence of centralised socio-economic data collected systematically and purposefully makes their inclusion in decision-making challenging and often impractical. Drawing on the aggregation of a variety of data from heterogeneous stakeholders, we present and test the Ecosystem Service Value Chain (ESVC), a decision-oriented data structuring framework for visualising, organising, and prioritising socio-economic data for ecosystem management decision-making. The ESVC represents the stages and processes involved in delivering ecosystem services, from ecosystems to beneficiaries (government, industries, households, and First Nations Peoples). It reframes ecosystems as traceable value flows, linking ecosystem condition to service use, realised benefits and, where possible, valuation across distinct beneficiary groups. We demonstrate that this data structuring framework enhances transparency around data quality and gaps, providing a practical pathway for prioritising socio-economic information in management.

Item ID:	92627
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1654-7209
Keywords:	Coastal planning; Data; Ecosystem services; Environmental management; Great Barrier Reef (GBR)
Copyright Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Funders:	Australian Government Reef Trust, Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF)
Projects and Grants:	GBRF Reef Trust Partnership
Date Deposited:	06 Aug 2026 03:23
FoR Codes:	38 ECONOMICS > 3801 Applied economics > 380105 Environment and resource economics @ 70% 38 ECONOMICS > 3899 Other economics > 389902 Ecological economics @ 30%
SEO Codes:	15 ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK > 1599 Other economic framework > 159902 Ecological economics @ 30% 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1802 Coastal and estuarine systems and management > 180299 Coastal and estuarine systems and management not elsewhere classified @ 35% 19 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL HAZARDS > 1902 Environmental policy, legislation and standards > 190205 Environmental protection frameworks (incl. economic incentives) @ 35%
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