By Pei Xia, Jian Peng, Tianwei Gu, Shuying Yu, and Zihan Xu.
Lakes provide many important benefits, known as ecosystem services, that support human communities. These services include clean water for drinking and agriculture, flooding control, fish production, and maintaining natural habitats for plants and animals. However, climate change and increasing human activities are interfering with these services, making lakes more vulnerable to environmental and social risks. Despite their importance, scientists do not yet fully understand the challenges faced by lake-related ecosystem services.
Our study looks at how different lake services interact and sometimes conflict with each other. We focused on three key ecosystem service pairs: crop production and water purification services, freshwater provision and flood regulation services, and aquatic production and habitat maintenance services. When these ecosystem services are out of balance, serious problems can arise. For example, farming might harm water quality, and efforts to control floods might reduce freshwater provision. These conflicts create risks such as polluted water (specifically, eutrophication with nutrients from agriculture pollute water), more frequent flooding, and declining biodiversity.
To tackle these risks and ensure sustainable use of lakes, we proposed a framework for managing social-ecological risks. This framework takes a comprehensive approach by considering all elements of the social-ecological system, the processes that connect them, and the spatial relationships across lake basins. It focuses on three key strategies: restoring damaged ecosystems, optimizing landscape patterns, and providing compensation for negatively affected communities. By taking this big-picture approaches and looking at how all the parts of a lake system connect, it can reduce the negative impacts of trade-offs, protect the benefits lakes provide, and create a sustainable future for both people and nature. This study highlighted the need for thoughtful actions to ensure lakes remain healthy and continue to support human and environmental well-being.
Relational Thinking 