The services provided by ecosystems play a vital role in human well-being. Although some ecosystem services are easily recognized—food, timber, and freshwater, for example—others may be less apparent. Ecosystems control erosion; reduce the damage caused by natural disasters; and regulate our air, water, and soil quality. A reduction or loss of any of these services and the benefits they provide can have socio-economic ramifications that reverberate beyond environmental damages.Standard environmental and social impact assessments (ESIAs) do not specifically account for a project’s impacts on ecosystem service benefits. As a result, assessments might overlook stakeholders who are vulnerable to ecosystem change, or miss some of the harm-ful social consequences of a project’s environ-mental effects. Integrating ecosystem services into impact assessments results in a more comprehensive and realistic assessment of a project’s immediate and long-term impacts. Responding to the need to identify and plan for these impacts, ESIA standards have started to integrate ecosystem services into project impact assessments. The Interna-tional Finance Corporation’s (IFC) perfor-mance standards reflect this trend: as of 2012, IFC-financed projects are required to preserve the benefits from ecosystem ser-vices. Going a step beyond project impacts, the IFC also requires that the environmental and social risks and impacts identification process considers a project’s dependence on ecosystem services. Just as development proj-ects can jeopardize the benefits that flow from ecosystem services, changes in ecosystems can endanger project outcomes.