Assessing social values of ecosystem services in the Phewa Lake Watershed, Nepal
Graphical abstract
Introduction
The ecosystem services framework is increasingly being used as a tool for natural resource management (Chan et al., 2011; Fisher et al., 2009; Lamarque et al., 2011; Lele et al., 2013; Oteros-Rozas et al., 2014). Ecosystem services assessment has been given importance in international initiatives such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA), the Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity (TEEB) and the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (Oteros-Rozas et al., 2014). However, most of these studies have focused on biophysical assessments and economic valuation (Garcia-Llorente et al., 2011; Nieto-Romero et al., 2014; Plieninger et al., 2013; Schroter et al., 2014; Seppelt et al., 2012) while social values have received less attention (Chan et al., 2012; Cole et al., 2015; Martin-Lopez et al., 2012; van Riper et al., 2017). More broadly, community values and, local knowledge have been essential components of natural resource management for several decades (Sherren et al., 2010), although social value has been given a lower priority (Smith and Sullivan, 2014). Recently, the importance of integrating social perspectives of ecosystem services (ES) has been promoted as a strategy for sustainable development (Caceres et al., 2015; Chan et al., 2012; Martin-Lopez et al., 2012; Nagendra et al., 2013; Reyers et al., 2013).
Social values for ecosystem services represent benefits that ecosystems provide to society (Kendal et al., 2015; Kenter et al., 2015) and the perceived quality of natural ecosystems for human well-being (MEA, 2005; van Riper et al., 2017). They indicate which services are directly experienced by individuals and are tied to intrinsic motivations to own, manage, and protect natural resources (Brown and Fagerholm, 2015). Some recent studies have been focused on social values approach in woodlands and forests (Sherrouse et al., 2014), grasslands (Lamarque et al., 2011), coastal zones and mangroves (Cole et al., 2015), watersheds services (Zagarola et al., 2014) and on a regional scale (Bryan et al., 2010; Raymond et al., 2009). However, their focus has been on cultural services; the social values ascribed to provisioning, regulating and supporting services have largely been disregarded (Plieninger et al., 2013). This oversight may be due to a lack of expertise, confusion over defining social values (Felipe-lucia et al., 2015) or methodological difficulties (Bagstad et al., 2016). A growing interest in the use of ‘social value of ecosystem services’ is not yet methodologically aligned with what is actually being assessed and valued in ecosystem services (Nahuelhual et al., 2016).
Application of social values in landscape management and planning are manifold (Table 1). A few studies have used social values and local preferences (Scholte et al., 2015) and they highlight the relevance of social values in ES assessment and valuation in landscapes that have been shaped by long-term community activities (Iniesta-arandia et al., 2014; Lakerveld et al., 2015; Martin-Lopez et al., 2012; Oteros-Rozas et al., 2014), such as community-based forestry. In fact, community-based forestry (CBF) has developed through co-evolution of human societies, social values and biophysical systems (Zoderer et al., 2016) and is driven by societal priorities, considering what society wants from their forests. This, in turn, is governed by both traditional practices and locally developed rules and regulations. CBF often implicitly incorporates different ES values, but these are often not transparent to local communities or wider users and decision makers. Linking the social values concept to CBF is, therefore, a potentially innovative tool for stimulating thinking regarding the importance of ecosystem services from community forests (Pandey et al., 2016, 2014).
In Nepal, community-based forestry emerged following a series of catastrophic policy failures prior to 1970. These resulted in an environmental crisis due to massive deforestation that triggered widespread landslides, raw materials shortage and water scarcity in the mountain regions and flooding in the plains (Gautam et al., 2004). The success of CBF in the restoration of Nepalese mountain landscapes has been widely recognised (Maraseni et al., 2014, 2005; Maraseni and Pandey, 2014; Paudyal et al., 2017c). However, local people have not fully realised the benefits of this restoration resulting from their activities. Local people can realise greater benefits if an ES approach is mainstreamed into community-based forest management (Paudyal et al., 2017a, 2016), with a focus on meeting the needs of local communities and providing rights, justice and equity in the distribution of benefits accruing from efforts to restore degraded watersheds (Cronkleton et al., 2017; Paudyal et al., 2017b).
Recent research has explored the relationship between ecosystem services and community-based forest management (Birch et al., 2014; Paudyal et al., 2017a). Appropriate method to assess the social values would contribute to a broader understanding of this relationship (Pan et al., 2016). Priorities are determined by socially and individually-held values (Al-assaf et al., 2014) however, these values and attitudes regarding natural resource management vary between rural and urban populations (Hicks et al., 2013; Williams et al., 2017). In the case of CBF, a significant variation in the selection of priority ecosystem services has been observed between rural and urban people. Rural people are more emotionally attached to forests and surrounding landscapes compared to urban people, as a result of regular interactions with landscapes in various facets of life (Pan et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2017) and it is necessary to identify these differences for effective management decisions (Bryan et al., 2010; Kumar and Kumar, 2008).
Multiple interactions occur between ecosystem services in community-managed forests because they provide numerous benefits to several users (Briner et al., 2013). Understanding such interactions and associations (positive and negative) is required for managing multiple ES (Bennett et al., 2009). Trade-offs occur when an improvement in one ES results in a decline in another (Howe et al., 2014) or among stakeholders when a particular ES is prioritised by one stakeholder at the expense of the preference of others (McShane et al., 2011). Conversely, when stakeholders assign similar priorities to multiple ES, synergies can emerge (Hicks et al., 2013). Synergies and trade-offs create opportunities and conflicts, and their study can provide decision-makers with information to maximise benefits and transparently address conflicts (Bennett et al., 2009; Crouzat et al., 2016; Hicks et al., 2013).
This study aims to assess perceptions of the social values of ecosystem services resulting from community-based forestry and to assess and prioritise ecosystem services for different stakeholders based on these perceptions. An additional aim was to identify areas of agreement (synergies) and conflict (potential trade-offs) among priority ES. The study was undertaken in the watershed of Lake Phewa (hereafter Phewa watershed in western Nepal where six upstream community forest user groups (CFUGs), downstream business people and experts were consulted using mixed methods research to record their perceptions and opinions.
Section snippets
Social valuation framework
Many frameworks have been used for ES assessment and prioritisation (Boyd and Banzhaf, 2007; Costanza et al., 1997; de Groot et al., 2002; MEA, 2005; TEEB, 2010). It has been suggested that monetary valuation frameworks are incapable of accommodating public values and preferences (de Oliveira and Berkes, 2014; Kumar and Kumar, 2008; Ulgiati et al., 2011) and that economic models and valuation methods are limited to represent the entire social values, instead of signaling that economic values
Study area
We selected the watershed area of Lake Phewa as the research area because it is accessible, is a successful case of participatory watershed conservation, has a long history of CBF and a variety of forest types and restored forests in good condition. The watershed provides water for drinking, hydropower and irrigation. It feeds the beautiful Lake Phewa that is the backbone of Pokhara's tourism and economy (Regmi and Saha, 2015). The watershed lies between 28°11′39 and 28°17′25 north latitudes
Important ecosystem services and their connection to social values
Drawn from the knowledge and perceptions of upstream residents, 81.5% of the sampled respondents recognised that ecosystems from Phewa watershed delivered 23 ES to society (Fig. 4). Members of the business communities and experts were in full agreement with this list. Responses received varied from 35 (58%) to 60 (100%) regarding the identification of ecosystem services (Table A1). Ecosystem services that were well-known and easily understood by local communities were provisioning and cultural
Discussion
This study confirmed that there are spatial associations between social values, local practices and resource use in ES assessment that are consistent with previous studies (Martin-Lopez et al., 2012; Oteros-Rozas et al., 2014; Zoderer et al., 2016). A framework was designed and implemented to evaluate ES assessment in CBF regimes that depend on participatory tools to bring together inputs from communities and experts (Felipe-lucia et al., 2015). The use of this framework demonstrates how
Conclusion
This study aimed to quantify the social values ascribed to ecosystem services in the forests of the Phewa watershed in western Nepal, where there has been considerable landscape change over the last 30 years associated with community-based forestry. The results indicated that the watershed provides 23 ecosystem services to local communities and a wider set of users across Nepal and beyond. This study demonstrated the spatial associations between public uses, social values and ES supply.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Australia Awards Scholarship Program for providing financial support to the first author. We are deeply grateful to all participants of the focus group discussions and workshops for their time for meetings and discussions. Our cordial thanks go to the staff of District Forest Office, Kaski, District Soil Conservation Office, Kaski, Hariyoban Program, Pokhara for their support for fieldwork and workshops. Two anonymous referees and the copy-editor are gratefully
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