A social-ecological approach to support equitable land use decision-making.

Human-driven land use change can result in unequitable outcomes in the provision and appropriation of ecosystem services (ES). To better address equity-related effects of land use change in decision-making, analyses of land use and ES changes under different land use management alternatives should incorporate ecological and social information and take a disaggregated approach to ES analysis. Because such approaches are still scarce in the literature, we present a generalized social-ecological approach to support equitable land use decision-making (in terms of process and outcomes) and an example of its application to a case study in southwestern Ethiopia.