Policy relevance Policy makers, researchers and analysts helping to plan and implement REDD+, environmental services and climate change would find this paper potentially helpful. The paper explores progress on REDD+ Readiness across four countries (Cameroon, Indonesia, Peru and Vietnam) and provides broad lessons, recommendations and examples across these countries for further improving REDD+. The paper also suggests an innovative, credible and universally applicable set of criteria and indicators derived through a systematic review that could serve further global comparative analysis of readiness for REDD+ and relevant national environmental services delivery systems, including climate change mitigation.

Payments for environmental services (PES), the non-provisioning part of ecosystem services, target alignment of microeconomic incentives for land users with meso- and macroeconomic societal costs and benefits of their choices across stakeholders and scales. They can interfere with or complement social norms and rights-based approaches at generic (land-use planning) and individual (tenure, use rights) levels; they interact with macroeconomic policies influencing the drivers to which individual agents respond. In many developing country contexts, community scale factors strongly influence land users' decisions, whereas unclear land rights complicate the use of market-based instruments. PES concepts need to adapt. Multiple paradigms have emerged within the broad PES domain. Evidence suggests that forms of “coinvestment in stewardship” (CIS) alongside rights are the preferred entry point. Commodification of environmental services (ES) and ES markets might evolve later on, but require strong government regulation to set and enforce rules of the game. We frame hypotheses for wider testing and “no-regrets” recommendations for practitioners.

The recent interest in multi-functional agricultural landscapes has not been matched with formal assessment of the roles that trees play across the spectrum of ecosystem services (ESs) provided in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). A structured literature review (1995-2014) assessed 350 journal articles about provision of one or more ESs by trees on farms and in agricultural landscapes in SSA. This revealed information on 15 ESs from studies in 23 countries covering arid (1% of studies), semi-arid (49%), sub-humid (26%) and humid (24%) agro-ecological zones. The majority of the studies reported provisioning (39%) and supporting (35%) followed by regulating (26%) ESs while studies on cultural services were scarce. Beneficial impacts of trees were dominating (58%), in particular in semi-arid zones where they were associated with enhancing water and nutrient cycling. A decline in some ESs was reported in 15% of the studies, while 28% found no effect of trees. Although the effects of trees were mainly positive, a decline in crop production was noted as a key trade-off against the provisions of ESs, such as modification of microclimate. This highlights the need to manage trade-offs among impacts of trees on ES provision to reduce competition and increase complementarity between trees and crops.

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Grasslands are areas where the vegetation is dominated by grasses (Poaceae family). They are an intrinsic part of both rangelands and pasturelands and constitute about half of the global land area. Grassland provides different functions, such as livestock feed, environmental regulation, sequestration of soil carbon, biological diversity and maintenance of soil health (Carlier, ROTAR, Vlahova,