Concluding Thoughts

Hello all!

It has been a busy term having to keep up with two blogs (GEOG3057: Life in Plastics), but I have enjoyed every bit of it. I dare say that this was a challenging topic to embark on, especially as I had no idea of what water meant as an ecosystem service since I had not previously encountered it in any assignment or coursework.

Initially, some posts were difficult to construct as I found myself elaborating more on other ecosystem services rather than direct uses of water (eg. consumption and agricultural production). My references to water at many points of this blog felt forced, such as when I added a line about recreational water sports being possible only because of the presence of water. Some other examples include the application of an ecosystem services approach to conserving biodiversity in wetlands, which relies indirectly on water bodies to thrive. In some posts, it was impossible to even refer to “water” directly. Nevertheless, these confusions formed the largest factor attributing to my enjoyment in writing this blog. The posts led me to understand water a lot more as an “umbrella service” which was essential to the sustenance of many other ecosystem services – biodiversity, water yield, carbon storage from tree growth, alleviation of pollution, water sports, basically everything (Turpie et al. 2008). It was difficult to elaborate on water and water only as a provisioning service; it was definitely necessary to elaborate on other ecosystem services to accompany the understanding of water as an essential good that sustains the entire ecosystem.

I have also spoken a lot about how they may be applied in management scenarios – monetary and non-monetary valuations, mapping and modeling. These interests in environmental management arise from a desire to understand environmental economics in a greater depth, which in my opinion, would become of increasing importance in development due to the need to minimise for our impacts on the environment with the recent COP21/23 negotiations in response to anthropogenically-induced climate change. Speaking at lengths about environmental management was therefore what I felt to be a practical approach to future environmental policy-making. I hope this suffices our understanding to understand why the continued supply and provision of water is essential to our well being, in all aspects of the ecosystem and our lives. I also hope that through this blog, I have made the new concept of an ecosystem services approach to water ring strongly to you as a promising approach for environmental management.

If you happen to enjoy my writing, do read more on my personal blog. Hope you had a great term!

Climate Change

Hello all,

In the last two weeks, I have spoken about how an ecosystem services approach may aid in policy applications to inform decision-making in biodiversity conservation and land use change. In the final post of this blog, I will speak about how an ecosystem services approach may be used to understand climate change.

Water and Food

Africa is undisputedly one of the least resilient continents when it comes to climate change due to its spatial location relatively in the lower latitudes. The immediate impact would be the changes in water levels through the differing water bodies, with Africa likely experiencing more intense and less frequent precipitation events, leading to a total alteration of the present river regime (Magadza, 1994). Some presently perennial water bodies may even be lost to climate change due to a general reduction in river output, which may hit Africa as a continent most due to its reliance on direct ecosystem services for livelihoods - water consumption, collection of water from these rivers for sanitary purposes, and pollution regulation for heavily contaminated rural areas.

On top of climate change affecting water consumption, a reduction in river output is likely to directly affect food production negatively. Increases in global temperatures within Africa has also been found to cause up to a 30% decrease in crop yields (Parry et al. 2004), and a study on impact of climate change on fisheries identify coastal west and central Africa as the most vulnerable (Allison et al. 2009). Most African countries depend on direct ecosystem services provided by subsistence crops for their livelihoods and fish stocks as a source of protein and cash earnings, for example 45% of animal protein in Congo is from fish. Negative effects of climate change on crop yield and fish production may therefore severely threaten the livelihoods of people in these countries (Egoh et al. 2012), and force migration in search for food.

Although most crop modelling studies agree on overall agricultural yield declines, these predictions can be very uncertain spatially. For example, East Africa has been cited to agree on rainfall increases in most seasons through the GCMs. Increased rainfall may promote net primary productivity and carbon storage due to the shift towards a more tree-dominated ecosystem, improving ecosystem conditions for greater agricultural output (Doherty et al. 2010). A fundamental shift to a different ecosystem however, means that trade-offs are bound to occur in the lost ecosystem. At this point, by using the mapping and modelling approaches mentioned in my previous post in addition to crop modelling, it may be possible to derive whether such ecosystem service changes are for the better in this particular area - supplementing a monetary valuation to this approach may then allow us to derive whether climate change is economically beneficial to a region. Safeguarding these ecosystem services provisions is arguably in line with many governments' objectives to improve the livelihoods of their citizens, and should therefore lie at the forefront of policy-making.

In my next post, I would conclude the contents of this blog. Thank you for all the comments thus far!

Monitoring Changes in Ecosystem Services

Hello all!

In my previous post, I concluded the examples of both monetary and non-monetary valuations of ecosystem services for the environmental policy-making. Although the referred reading is filled with mathematical jargon, I hope to provide a brief and comprehensible summary on how mapping and modeling approaches can be used to quantify biophysical changes in ecosystem services, which are beneficial to management scenarios in consideration of future changes. They combine ecosystem service analyses with the emerging field on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), both of which are emerging academic fields in their own right.

Ecosystem services change in West Africa (Leh et al. 2013)

Tools such as the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) tool (Tallis et al. 2011) were used to quantify individual ecosystem services – selecting and quantifying for biodiversity, surface water yield, carbon storage, sediment retention, nitrogen retention and phosphorus retention across 40 hydrological basins in both Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. These were run using previously published literature on the formulae deriving each ecosystem service (FAO, 2004; Tallis et al. 2011; Wischmeier and Smith, 1978; Woomer et al. 2004; Hassan et al. 2005).

These indices were standardized across all 40 basins for comparison and subsequently combined in the study to provide an overall value of the ecosystem status, and GIS analysis through remote sensing was subsequently carried out to visualize ecosystem changes at the basin and sub-basin scales from changing land use.

Figure 5. Map representation of Ecosystem Services Status Index (ESSI) for the numbered hydrological basins in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

Figure 6. Basin-scale Ecosystem Services Change Index over time relative to 2000, for the 40 numbered major hydrologic basins in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

The ESSI allows us to first prioritise the location of these services by identifying which basin has shown the most negative impacts, and subsequently the ESCI allows for us to identify which individual ecosystems services have been depleting to prioritise for mitigation and conservation. The ESSI values for basin 10 in both 2005 and 2009 indicate critical danger with about 38% loss in total number of ecosystem services analysed relative to 2000 as seen in Figure 5. The ESCI supplements this understanding to identify which services ought to be given extra attention, for example in basin 10 biodiversity and water yield should be targeted since there is a loss of 63% and 19% of services respectively relative to 2000 conditions seen in Figure 6. These two highlighted figures are often in synergy - biodiversity loss can often be linked to losses in water yield, or vice versa. They provide quick and essential information required for the management of ecosystem services.

The study was one of the first studies in data scarce West Africa on mapping multiple ecosystem services statuses at the basin scale. Modelling and mapping these ecosystem statuses allows for the cumulative impression of all activities on ecosystem health, especially in response to changing land use. Overall, there was a general decrease in ecosystem services from 2000 to 2009. Such findings could be simulated for areas with better geospatial information, where future scenarios of land use could be modeled to identify for the losses in ecosystem services. Nonetheless, caution is necessary in interpreting these simulations, as they are sensitive to the geographic resolution and choice of ecosystem services, as different sets of ecosystem services would see significantly different results from the trade-offs between ecosystem services.

In this post, I have mostly spoken about how geographical information systems may be paired with an ecosystem services approach to identify impacts of changing land use, with a case study focus on data scarce West Africa. In my next post, I would speak more about an ecosystem service approach in the face of future climate change, and the impending threats to livelihoods.

See you!

Biodiversity Conservation

Hello all,

In my previous posts, I have elaborated largely on the identification and measurement of ecosystem services, and an example of trade-offs that could occur using an ecosystem approach. In this post, I will subsequently speak more about the application of the ecosystem services approach to biodiversity conservation.

1. Informs Decisions on Biodiversity Conservation

The ecosystem services approach informs decision-making for biodiversity conservation, especially for uninterested communities. In the South African Municipality of uMhlathuze, there was enormous pressures to expand development projects into sub-catchment areas in response to population growth (Ingram et al. 2012). Tensions between biodiversity conservation and development arose. To the underprivileged communities, the biodiversity conservationists were indirectly expressing that protecting species diversity was more important than the developmental needs of the community.

In response, the municipality carried out the Strategic Catchment Assessment to value ecosystem services in the catchment area. The study highlighted the free ecosystem services that have always been provided to the neighbouring population: nutrient cycling, waste management, water supply, water regulation, flood regulation and drought management, all of which valued to about US$200 million a year. Subsequently, the community was more encouraging in the protection of the natural environment as they realised that the sub-catchment area and its water resources provided large economic benefit; biodiversity was not the sole reason. 

2. Increases Value of Larger Protected Areas

Large protected areas currently hold many of the world's endemic and rare species, and these areas have often been earmarked for conservation for the purposes of maintaining biodiversity. In situations of land pressure and limited biodiversity funding for protected areas however, it is increasingly difficult to maintain these huge areas of land for the sake of biodiversity alone. Biodiversity conservation may therefore be in greater support if there is recognition of the ecosystem services provided, which are especially beneficial in large protected areas.

For example, these protected areas are important to provide for direct (eg. food and timber) and indirect (eg. clean water from regulation) provisioning ecosystem services, benefits that the underprivileged may not be able to replace immediately (Turner et al. 2012). In particular, regulatory services are especially pronounced in these large protected areas - the "invisible services" that are difficult to measure and are not directly consumed by humans, such as nutrient cycling and pollution control (Ingram et al. 2012: 5). For example, large conservation areas like wetlands increase the transport distance of polluted water flowing through them, increasing their potential for landscape-scale pollutant retention (Quin et al. 2015). The increased perceived value of the protected areas may therefore ensure for the continued persistence of these huge areas of protected land, which may initially be economically unjustifiable.

Limitations (Ingram et al. 2012)

1. The approach cannot capture all critical species, especially the species that are not "useful" or "valuable" to people. For example, rare and endemic species often do not have an important functional role, and it may therefore be difficult to justify their ecological importance to the community.

2. The approach may not prioritise important ecological processes to species, unless they deliver benefits to humans. Fire regimes are often designed to reduce chances of negative impacts of humans, but they are not beneficial to the native community and can lead to major changes in community structure within the landscape.

*3. PES approaches that aim to restore completely degraded ecosystems may lead to trade-offs (recall: Carbon and Water trade-off), as PES approaches often aim to optimise a single service which may undermine other critical ecological functions. In general, it may be most ideal for PES programmes to preserve and enhance existing ecosystems instead, to have the best combined impact on biodiversity and ecological processes (eg. paying native communities to preserve grasslands and wildlife for safari tourism).

The ecosystem services approach is especially important to communities that may place their own needs over biodiversity conservation, as it explicitly highlights the benefits that may otherwise have been neglected. Linking to the water and development goals within Africa, the ecosystem services approach has illustrated how the optimal decision can be made when considering the trade-off between development and biodiversity in the above-mentioned examples. These two management approaches were only possible to carry out as the revenue stream from water-related ecosystem services far exceeded the benefits from destroying these critical conservation areas for development purposes.

These have all encouraged the local communities to engage in sustainable resource practices and decision-making in support of biodiversity conservation, and is therefore also applicable for future biodiversity conservation intentions. However, to improve further, it is important to evolve in our understanding of an ecosystem service approach to include more forms of improved well-being (eg. in consideration of endemic species) to protect the range of ecosystems and species diversity on Earth.

In my next post, I will use another case study on how an ecosystem services approach may assist in resource management and decision-making through their application to land use change.

See you next week!

Non-Monetary Valuations of Water

Hello all,

In my previous posts, I spoke mostly about monetary valuations of ecosystem services, which have been used widely in the field due to their applicability.  In this post, I will describe in further detail about the attempts to measure cultural ecosystem services.

Intangible benefits, compared to the measurable quantities of ecosystem services, are more difficult to standardize and quantify across plurality of perspectives (Ament et al. 2017). They can only be measured qualitatively, through interviews or soft knowledge from people, but even so such responses are difficult to grapple with as the perception of value of cultural ecosystem services are often influenced by one’s cultural upbringing and beliefs. Further research however, has recognized that different ecosystem services often occur together in “service bundles” (Cumming and Peterson, 2005), either because of co-provisioning when one ecosystem provides several services or co-dependence when one ecosystem service requires another service.

These bundles have been seen through synergies and trade-offs, as I have written about in a previous post using the ecosystem services approach to determine the most financially justifiable approach. Similarly, decisions made in favour of the environment should also recognise the most balanced cultural service bundles, or which particular bundle to favour that should provide the maximal benefit to human wellbeing.

Case Study: National Parks in South Africa (Ament et al. 2017)

Visitors to the park were encouraged to complete self-explanatory questionnaires rating their appreciation of different aspects of protected areas on a five-point scale. These questions underwent exploratory factor analysis and it was found that five bundles of cultural ecosystem services explained 35.3% of the variance in survey responses, which were then grouped into titles: natural history, recreation, sense of place, safari experience, and outdoor living. These five bundles saw synergies within certain parks, but large trade-offs were also evident in certain parks.

1. Trade-off/synergies between natural history and (water) recreation

Most parks showed a trade-off between the bundles of natural history and recreation, such as the Tankwa-Karoo and Namaqua Park. These two parks are situated in the Succulent Karoo biome, a fragile biodiversity hotspot that may see losses to biodiversity if thrilling adventurous activities such as mountain biking were to be permitted within the park.

However, some parks saw synergies, such as within the Richtersveld and the West Coast Park with large water bodies enabling cultural services from water. The community has always managed these parks, with varied longstanding activities such as fishing and water sports amid the high demands for natural history in the rich biodiversity of the region. These must however be delicately managed – to ensure that biodiversity is not sacrificed while pursuing for the continued provision of the communal services provided by water in the form of recreation to park visitors.

2. Synergies between natural history and safari experience

Most parks generated synergies between these two ecosystem bundles, which show evidence that promoting wildlife safari experiences were a means to promote natural history and encourage biodiversity conservation.

3. Trade-off between safari experience and recreation

All parks showed this trade-off, with the trade-offs being larger in parks that contained some or all of the big five (African lion, African leopard, African elephant, Black and White rhinoceros, and Cape buffalo). Realistic opportunities for activities are limited in the presence of large and dangerous wildlife, explaining the trade-off being cited by most people.

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These qualitative measurements have strong practical applicability to the area of environmental management especially in protected areas. Park managers ought to align with the specific requests of cultural ecosystem services demanded by park-goers. For example, nature parks with naturally rich biodiversity and high demand for services of natural history should increase investment in educational and viewing resources such as species lists, bird hides, and vegetation maps; parks with greater demand for recreational activities may look to publishing promotions on equipment hire such as horse-riding, camel riding or bike tours. In interest of economic returns from park tourism, there is also little reason to introduce recreational activities into a park if park-goers appreciate it most for their safari experiences.

Taking a macro-perspective to the management of the parks in a country may also be useful. It may be most financially feasible to spread bundles cultural ecosystem services across the 19 parks equally, such that certain parks are best known for their provision of certain bundles – with the Namaqua most known for natural history and Marakele set aside for safari experiences. These would increase visitorship across all parks, as demands for different bundles have to be met in different localities.

This post forms the conclusion to the case studies on ecosystem services valuation and their practical applications to policy-making, as I would subsequently move on to further applications of an ecosystem services approach for our future: monitoring change and incentivising change.

See you next week!

Trade-offs and Challenges (WfW Programme)

Hello all!

In this post, I will elaborate more on the problems facing the WfW Programme in South Africa that I  spoke about last week, and my personal opinions on the contesting uses.

1. Tradeoff between Ecosystem Services: Carbon vs Water

In a separate study, it was found that afforestation of Pinus radiata (one of the invasive species) and the associated benefits of carbon sequestration and timber production are more economically viable than the benefits from increased water resources from clearing out invasive species at current water tariffs (Chisholm, 2010).  However, I beg to differ as water tariffs imposed on the forestry industry are estimated based on streamflow reductions from establishing the plantations, but they have hardly considered for the actual costs of land-use change and water losses for reasons below:

a) Streamflow reduction was estimated to be 90mm for Jonkershoek, a mere third of the actual streamflow reduction. Water tariffs were therefore priced much lower ("water valued [at a] fraction of one percent of the true value of water").

b) There are sunk costs from the loss of biodiversity from invading species, due to the conversion of Fynbos spp. to Pinus spp, and the potential uncontrolled invasion of P. radiata following future fires from warmer temperatures.

c) A treeless landscape associated with the Pinus plantations may lower albedo, rendering climate change mitigation ineffective from carbon sequestration.

d) Future increases in value of water, increasing water demands from population growth and decreasing supply from decreased rainfall in the Fynbos biome will seriously challenge the viability of afforestation. Continued large-scale afforestation will deplete the scarce water resources, increase water scarcity and possibly lead to large economic losses.

The article steers clear of establishing a conclusion for the future, as the net benefits between carbon and water depend on their future estimated costs. If the sum of economic benefits from carbon sequestration within the Pinus plantations were to outweigh the value of water at an extreme scenario of $257/tCO₂ in the event of extreme increases in carbon prices, an ecosystem services approach would call for the afforestation of trees at the expense of water resources as water and its associated benefits are economically viable only for carbon pricing scenarios under $100/tCO₂.

In my personal opinion however, water scarcity is clearly a greater developmental issue than increased CO₂, as the lack of water for domestic uses and consumption will seriously threaten livelihoods directly, while an increased CO₂ from a contracted carbon sink presents its risk to human health only in indirect ways. These may materialise in the forms of increased temperatures causing climate change and extreme weather events, but are arguably not as pressing as the lack of water to get by on a daily basis. These circumstances are when an ecosystem services approach may be lacking, as they do not consider for indirect benefits from water as a service providing unit; for example, 100ml of consumed water can be quantified in cost, but it may be tricky to attribute a value to positive externalities such as good health and well-being from the consumption of water. 

2. Challenges to Poverty Alleviation (McConnachie, 2013)

a) The WfW project only provides temporary employment, therefore making a small impact on the actual percentages of unemployed people within the country. Even so, the pool of unemployed people was from selection committees, and nepotism from local community leaders had disadvantaged the neediest.

b) The low wages for the poorest meant that workers were unmotivated, likely unskilled and inexperienced, leading to many wasted resources and fewer environmental benefits arising from inefficiencies (recall: concept of economic efficiency).

c) Beyond the two-year contract, the programme worsened the long-term livelihoods of workers as it diverted them from finding more sustainable income flows, but had not value-added to their lives and skill sets due to the low quality of training.

d) Clearing alien plants may actually have led to a loss of livelihoods for the poor who depended on harvesting timber and fuelwood in domestic trade and personal use (Wilgen and Wannenburgh, 2016).

In spite of all these issues challenging the personal development of the underprivileged communities, I still think highly of the Working for Water programme due to its well-meaning ecological and developmental intentions for South Africa. The effectiveness of public works programmes for poverty alleviation may potentially be enhanced by improving work conditions, providing employment benefits and imparting transferable skills into more well-paying opportunities within the agricultural sector. Ecological restoration based on the value of water however, should require a more detailed economic valuation of the true costs/benefits of water for greater economic justification.

Thank you for following through on South Africa for two weeks. In so far, I have mostly spoken about the economic valuation of ecosystem services. In my next post, I hope to talk more about non-monetary approaches to the valuation of water as an ecosystem service, so as to expand our understanding of what an ecosystem service approach encompasses.

See you next Thursday!

Conservation and Poverty Relief (WfW Programme)

Hello all!

I will write more about ecosystem services in line with poverty relief as mentioned in my previous post, and I hope this would contextualise the current state of human development in Africa within ecological objectives. After writing about the wetlands and rivers in the wetter regions of Africa, I will briefly share my thoughts about the semi-arid South Africa's Working for Water (WfW) Programme.

Working for Water (WfW) Programme, South Africa (Turpie et al. 2008)

In South Africa, the introduction of hectares of alien trees from afforestation had led to uncontrolled populations of invasive species which out-competed the indigenous tree species. These wiped out the original heterogeneity and biodiversity of the landscape and led to a presence of single-species strands of trees. Even though this invasion had presented forestry benefits (eg. timbre and carbon sequestration), these alien tree species had demonstrated a large negative effect on stream runoff. They were studied to have extremely intensive water uses and high losses through to evapotranspiration; the current invasion saw 15 invasive species utilising as much as ~7% of the runoff of the country (Wilgen et al. 1998). Their uniform presence within the landscape had reduced the catchment runoff drastically, especially in their situation close to watercourses.

In response to the issues of invasive species and water scarcity defined as 500-1000m³/person by Turpie et al. (2008), the WfW programme was initiated as a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) approach. Monetary payments were made to the poorest of the poor for their contribution to ecosystem restoration through the ambitious project to restore the presence of rivers within the landscape. They were offered two-year contracts to perform restoration work by clearing alien plants through slash-and-hook and chainsaw methods, at a minimal but nevertheless living wage (Wilgen et al. 1998).  In 2005, the WfW employed 32k people through an annual budget of US$68m gathered mostly from poverty relief funding, and evidence of success has been sighted through accounts of rivers running where water had been absent for several years (Powell, 2006).

The programme has been cited as a "win-win" solution as they achieve societal and environmental goals at the same time (McConnachie et al. 2013: 544): a) promote biodiversity and ecosystem services by restoring the pre-existing water ecosystem functions of the landscape, b) increase scarce water resources to the region at a lower cost compared to developing additional water supply schemes, and c) alleviate poverty by providing paid employment to the poorest communities in South Africa. It presents, yet again, the potential of attaching a monetary value to ecosystem services for the management of ecosystems.

I will carry out more research into this area, and elaborate more on the limitations of this WfW programme next week. See you!