Increase in human population is accelerating the rate of land use change, biodiversity loss and habitat degradation, triggering a serious threat to life supporting ecosystem services. Existing strategies for biological conservation remain insufficient to achieve a sustainable human-nature relationship and this situation has fueled a debate on the conservation-exploitation dilemma. We need to devise novel strategies, in a mutually inclusive way, which can support biological conservation and secure economic development of deprived populations. Here we propose the use of designer ecosystems which can ensure ecological sustainability while providing ample and some new means of livelihood to local people. Such designer ecosystems may provide a solution to the conservation-exploitation dilemma through lessening population pressure on conserved ecosystems and remediating environmental pollution and ecosystem degradation to secure a broad range of ecosystem services of economic and cultural values.