Despite many advances in ecosystem service science and the connection of ecosystems to human well-being, more comprehensive assessments of costs, benefits and values are necessary to more fully understand the relationship of nature and quality of life at the regional and subregional scales. There is still a narrow focus on one or few services (NCP), and without a proper understanding of their relationships and interactions (Bennett et al., 2009). More holistic evaluations should put greater attention on the role of regulating and non-material (cultural) NCP when assessing land change processes and well change in the ocean. Admittedly, there are more difficulties in quantifying and valuing these less tangible NCP, which are more amenable to the standardization of monetary values via market mechanisms (sections 2.2.5, 2.2.6, 2.2.7). At the same time, we should point out that non-material NCP, like identities, are closely linked to human rights considerations, which in fact makes economic, cost-benefit type analyses inappropriate, and in violation of international agreements. Plus, we observed frequent gaps in databases, due to the fact that most social data is collected at the political scale, while ecological information is often specific to an ecosystem or biome. Even so, some political entities (e.g. Greenland) are almost entirely absent from global databases managed by the UN, World Bank and others, thus limiting country-level comparisons on all aspects of both social and ecological data.