Does Life Satisfaction Vary with Time and Income? Investigating the Relationship Among Free Time, Income, and Life Satisfaction.

Time and income are distinct and critical resources needed in the pursuit of happiness (life satisfaction). Income can be used to purchase market goods and services, and time can be used to spend time with friends and family, rest and sleep, and other activities. Yet little research has examined how different combinations of time and income affect life satisfaction, and if more of both is positively associated with greater levels of life satisfaction. We investigate whether life satisfaction significantly varies with time and income using data from the American Time Use Survey and its well-being module, which is a nationally representative sample of over 5000 US respondents over the age of 15. We plot a three-dimensional space exploring the relationship among time, income, and life satisfaction, finding people with similar incomes with less free time have lower levels of life satisfaction. We also identify different four subpopulations, three of which have low well-being along time and income, and one with high well-being along time and income. These sub-groups significantly differ along key characteristics. Respondents with less free time and low income-the doubly poor-are more likely to be female, less educated, and have more than two kids and young children. Those with low income but lots of time, in comparison, are more likely to be black, unemployed, and have some physical or cognitive difficult. We conclude that time provides unique insights into human well-being that income alone cannot capture and should be further incorporated into research and policy on life satisfaction.

Five financial incentives to revive the Gulf of Mexico dead zone and Mississippi basin soils.

A central challenge in the Mississippi River Basin is how to continue to support profitable agricultural production, provide water supply, flood control, transportation, and other benefits, while reducing the current burden of environmental degradation. Several practices have been shown to reduce nutrient runoff and water pollution, and improve soil fertility, while often yielding profits for farmers. Yet many of these beneficial practices remain underutilized. Participants at an expert workshop identified five candidate financial mechanisms that could increase adoption of these beneficial farming practices in four focal Midwest states in the next five years: crop insurance premium subsidies, transformation of the private service provider business model, expansion and targeting of 2019 U.S. Farm Bill funding, development of new state funds, and direction of post-disaster federal funds towards habitat restoration, particularly in floodplains. This study provides rough approximations of the change in nutrient runoff and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the annualized costs, and the nutrient and GHG reductions per dollar likely to result from deployment of each financial mechanism. Based upon these approximations, the adoption of these programs could reduce annual nitrate flows at the outlet of the Ohio and Upper Mississippi River Basins by 25%, surpassing the intermediate 2025 target (20% reduction) and achieving more than half of the long-term target (45% reduction) set by the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force. These approximations also illustrate that these five mechanisms could provide the same GHG reductions (∼43 Tg CO2e yr-1) as taking 12 coal-fired energy plants offline. The total cost of these five financial mechanisms is estimated at ∼$2.6 billion, or 64 g of nitrates and ∼17 kg of CO2e per dollar spent. These proposed solutions all face political, financial, cultural or institutional challenges, but with industry support, creative political action, and continued communication of both private and public benefits, they can create meaningful nutrient reductions and rebuild soils by 2022.

Evidence-Based Causal Chains for Linking Health, Development, and Conservation Actions.

Sustainability challenges for nature and people are complex and interconnected, such that effective solutions require approaches and a common theory of change that bridge disparate disciplines and sectors. Causal chains offer promising approaches to achieving an integrated understanding of how actions affect ecosystems, the goods and services they provide, and ultimately, human well-being. Although causal chains and their variants are common tools across disciplines, their use remains highly inconsistent, limiting their ability to support and create a shared evidence base for joint actions. In this article, we present the foundational concepts and guidance of causal chains linking disciplines and sectors that do not often intersect to elucidate the effects of actions on ecosystems and society. We further discuss considerations for establishing and implementing causal chains, including nonlinearity, trade-offs and synergies, heterogeneity, scale, and confounding factors. Finally, we highlight the science, practice, and policy implications of causal chains to address real-world linked human-nature challenges.

Setting the bar: Standards for ecosystem services.

Progress in ecosystem service science has been rapid, and there is now a healthy appetite among key public and private sector decision makers for this science. However, changing policy and management is a long-term project, one that raises a number of specific practical challenges. One impediment to broad adoption of ecosystem service information is the lack of standards that define terminology, acceptable data and methods, and reporting requirements. Ecosystem service standards should be tailored to specific use contexts, such as national income and wealth accounts, corporate sustainability reporting, land-use planning, and environmental impact assessments. Many standard-setting organizations already exist, and the research community will make the most headway toward rapid uptake of ecosystem service science by working directly with these organizations. Progress has been made in aligning with existing organizations in areas such as product certification and sustainability reporting, but a major challenge remains in mainstreaming ecosystem service information into core public and private use contexts, such as agricultural and energy subsidy design, national income accounts, and corporate accounts.

Natural capital and ecosystem services informing decisions: From promise to practice.

The central challenge of the 21st century is to develop economic, social, and governance systems capable of ending poverty and achieving sustainable levels of population and consumption while securing the life-support systems underpinning current and future human well-being. Essential to meeting this challenge is the incorporation of natural capital and the ecosystem services it provides into decision-making. We explore progress and crucial gaps at this frontier, reflecting upon the 10 y since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. We focus on three key dimensions of progress and ongoing challenges: raising awareness of the interdependence of ecosystems and human well-being, advancing the fundamental interdisciplinary science of ecosystem services, and implementing this science in decisions to restore natural capital and use it sustainably. Awareness of human dependence on nature is at an all-time high, the science of ecosystem services is rapidly advancing, and talk of natural capital is now common from governments to corporate boardrooms. However, successful implementation is still in early stages. We explore why ecosystem service information has yet to fundamentally change decision-making and suggest a path forward that emphasizes: (i) developing solid evidence linking decisions to impacts on natural capital and ecosystem services, and then to human well-being; (ii) working closely with leaders in government, business, and civil society to develop the knowledge, tools, and practices necessary to integrate natural capital and ecosystem services into everyday decision-making; and (iii) reforming institutions to change policy and practices to better align private short-term goals with societal long-term goals.

Mainstreaming nature in US federal policy.

Integrated policy changes must be cross-sectoral, appropriate, strategic, and evidence-based.

An ecosystem services framework to support both practical conservation and economic development.

The core idea of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is that the human condition is tightly linked to environmental condition. This assertion suggests that conservation and development projects should be able to achieve both ecological and social progress without detracting from their primary objectives. Whereas "win-win" projects that achieve both conservation and economic gains are a commendable goal, they are not easy to attain. An analysis of World Bank projects with objectives of alleviating poverty and protecting biodiversity revealed that only 16% made major progress on both objectives. Here, we provide a framework for anticipating win-win, lose-lose, and win-lose outcomes as a result of how people manage their ecosystem services. This framework emerges from detailed explorations of several case studies in which biodiversity conservation and economic development coincide and cases in which there is joint failure. We emphasize that scientific advances around ecosystem service production functions, tradeoffs among multiple ecosystem services, and the design of appropriate monitoring programs are necessary for the implementation of conservation and development projects that will successfully advance both environmental and social goals. The potentially bright future of jointly advancing ecosystem services, conservation, and human well-being will be jeopardized unless a global monitoring effort is launched that uses the many ongoing projects as a grand experiment.

Field evidence that ecosystem service projects support biodiversity and diversify options.

Ecosystem service approaches to conservation are being championed as a new strategy for conservation, under the hypothesis that they will broaden and deepen support for biodiversity protection. Where traditional approaches focus on setting aside land by purchasing property rights, ecosystem service approaches aim to engage a much wider range of places, people, policies, and financial resources in conservation. This is particularly important given projected intensification of human impacts, with rapid growth in population size and individual aspirations. Here we use field research on 34 ecosystem service (ES) projects and 26 traditional biodiversity (BD) projects from the Western Hemisphere to test whether ecosystem service approaches show signs of realizing their putative potential. We find that the ES projects attract on average more than four times as much funding through greater corporate sponsorship and use of a wider variety of finance tools than BD projects. ES projects are also more likely to encompass working landscapes and the people in them. We also show that, despite previous concern, ES projects not only expand opportunities for conservation, but they are no less likely than BD projects to include or create protected areas. Moreover, they do not draw down limited financial resources for conservation but rather engage a more diverse set of funders. We also found, however, that monitoring of conservation outcomes in both cases is so infrequent that it is impossible to assess the effectiveness of either ES or BD approaches.

Prioritizing actions: spatial action maps for conservation.

Spatial prioritization is a critical step in conservation planning, a process designed to ensure that limited resources are applied in ways that deliver the highest possible returns for biodiversity and human wellbeing. In practice, many spatial prioritizations fall short of their potential by focusing on places rather than actions, and by using data of snapshots of assets or threats rather than estimated impacts. We introduce spatial action mapping as an approach that overcomes these shortfalls. This approach produces a spatially explicit view of where and how much a given conservation action is likely to contribute to achieving stated conservation goals. Through seven case examples, we demonstrate simple to complex versions of how this method can be applied across local to global scales to inform decisions about a wide range of conservation actions and benefits. Spatial action mapping can support major improvements in efficient use of conservation resources and will reach its full potential as the quality of environmental, social, and economic datasets converge and conservation impact evaluations improve.