Exploring the effect of land use on ecosystem services: The distributive issues

•We try to understand the effects of land use on the ecosystem services (ES) distribution by different universes of humans: land owners; citizens of a country, and residents of Earth.•Key findings emerging from this case study suggest: that forest is the more balanced land use for ES wealth distribution relative to other land use studied (shrubland, water bodies mountain agriculture and other uses; that the distribution of ES benefits, which come from different land uses, is inequality between the different groups of humans analyzed; that the contemporary institutional arrangements of wealth distribution ensure a relatively equality distribution to internal stakeholders; however, a very unbalanced one to external stakeholders.•These results support the idea that alternative ways to integrate nature and economics should be further developed. The current debate of ecosystem services has focused more on monetary valuation methods and payments for environmental services (PES) then on the classic economic analysis (i.e. assumptions regarding: sustainability, justice and efficiency). This paper examines, taking into consideration ecosystem services, income distribution from different land uses to stakeholders. We study the Portuguese common land ecosystem, which is characterized as having a wide range of ecosystem services. Allowing that all the benefits can be translated into economic value, we estimated the total economic value (TEV) associated with these territories on 5 different land use situations: forest, shrubland, water bodies, mountain agriculture and other uses, and analyzed the current institutional arrangements around these territories. We found that the distribution of the benefits of different land uses is relatively inequality. The results showed that the contemporary institutional arrangements of wealth distribution ensure a relatively fair distribution insider of system; however this institutional arrangement is unable to ensure equitable distribution of wealth by external stakeholders. We can conclude that different types of land use provide a very asymmetric distribution of income by different groups of humans: land owners; citizens of a country, and residents of Earth.