Uncovering Ecosystem Service Bundles through Social Preferences

By B. Martín‐López, I. Iniesta-Arandia, M. García-Llorente, I. Palomo, Izaskun Casado-Arzuaga, D. G. Amo, E. Gómez‐Baggethun, E. Oteros‐Rozas, Igone Palacios-Agúndez, B. Willaarts and 5 more. PLoS ONE, 2012

984 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ecosystem service assessments have increasingly been used to support environmental management policies, mainly based on biophysical and economic indicators. However, few studies have coped with the social-cultural dimension of ecosystem services, despite being considered a research priority. We examined how ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs emerge from diverging social preferences toward ecosystem services delivered by various types of ecosystems in Spain. We conducted 3,379 direct face-to-face questionnaires in eight different case study sites from 2007 to 2011. Overall, 90.5% of the sampled population recognized the ecosystem’s capacity to deliver services. Formal studies, environmental behavior, and gender variables influenced the probability of people recognizing the ecosystem’s capacity to provide services. The ecosystem services most frequently perceived by people were regulating services; of those, air purification held the greatest importance. However, statistical analysis showed that socio-cultural factors and the conservation management strategy of ecosystems (i.e., National Park, Natural Park, or a non-protected area) have an effect on social preferences toward ecosystem services. Ecosystem service trade-offs and bundles were identified by analyzing social preferences through multivariate analysis (redundancy analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis). We found a clear trade-off among provisioning services (and recreational hunting) versus regulating services and almost all cultural services. We identified three ecosystem service bundles associated with the conservation management strategy and the rural-urban gradient. We conclude that socio-cultural preferences toward ecosystem services can serve as a tool to identify relevant services for people, the factors underlying these social preferences, and emerging ecosystem service bundles and trade-offs.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9dc4fca9d39434ade28a4cc043a080d56dfa051b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Creating win-wins from trade-offs? Ecosystem services for human well-being: A meta-analysis of ecosystem service trade-offs and synergies in the real world (2014, background): “Socio-cultural preferences (such as those related to gender, education, and rural versus urban) also influence what people are willing to trade-off (Martin-Lopez et al., 2012).”
Interactions Among Ecosystem Services Across Land Uses in a Floodplain (2014, background): “Although it is widely recognized that trade-offs arise because of management decisions, which derive from societal needs, values, and preferences, there is little research involving societal values as a potential source of trade-offs (but see Martín-López et al. 2012).”
Insight, part of a Special Feature on Ecosystem Service Trade-offs across Global Contexts and Scales A sustainability framework for assessing trade-offs in ecosystem services (2015, background): “…to effective resource planning and management arise because different stakeholder groups hold different preferences for and values about services (Martín-López et al. 2012), and services differ in their spatial or temporal patterns of benefits and costs (Hein et al. 2006, Laterra et al. 2012).”
Trade-offs across value-domains in ecosystem services assessment. (2014, background): “…may be measured by different indicators: such as (1) biophysical indicators regarding the ecosystem service delivery (e.g., MA, 2005a; EME, 2011), (2) socio-cultural preferences (e.g., Martín-López et al., 2012); and (3) monetary values (e.g., Hicks et al., 2009; Martín-López et al., 2011).”
The political ecology of ecosystem services (2015, background): “…– its commodification or reduction to financial values – abstract nature from its spatial and social contexts, enters it into capitalist relationships, and conceals or legitimates the social relations involved in its production (Castree, 2008; Ginn and Demeritt, 2009; McAfee, 1999, 2012a, b).”
Ecosystem service trade-offs from supply to social demand: A landscape-scale spatial analysis (2014, positive): “Social emand can be valued using non-monetary indicators including ssessment of people’s perceptions of the importance of different ervices (Martín-López et al., 2012) or using economic valuation echniques in real or hypothetical markets (Turner et al., 2010).”