Who loses? Tracking ecosystem service redistribution from road development and mitigation in the Peruvian Amazon

Development projects must increasingly include mitigation actions to offset their negative environmental and social impacts. However, current mitigation approaches can exacerbate social inequality by ignoring how the spatial location of offsets affects the benefits local people receive from ecosystem services (ES). Here, we present a method for tracking changes in ES benefits resulting from development and mitigation actions. To demonstrate this approach, we use as an example a proposed road through the Peruvian Amazon. We assessed the road's ES impacts and prioritized offsets in a socially equitable way. We found that the road is likely to have a disproportionate negative effect on drinking-water quality for nearby indigenous communities, and that offsets cannot fully compensate for these impacts. Equity was improved by including ES in spatial prioritization of mitigation. Including ES information in a "serviceshed"-based approach reduced average remaining, unmitigated impacts to drinking-water quality more than fourfold for sediment, 16-fold for nitrogen, and 38-fold for phosphorus loads, as compared with the impacts seen when offsets were sited based on methods relying on ecological processes alone.