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Environmental incomes sustained as provisioning ecosystem service availability declines along a woodland resource gradient in Zimbabwe

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  • Pritchard, Rose
  • Grundy, Isla M.
  • van der Horst, Dan
  • Ryan, Casey M.

Abstract

Forest and woodland resources can play a key role in rural livelihoods in the Global South, making it critical to understand what forest change could mean for rural wellbeing. Calculating environmental income has become a popular method of highlighting the importance of environmental resources in livelihoods, but few studies have quantified both provisioning ecosystem service availability and environmental income in the same landscape, or disaggregated environmental income by source land cover. This limits our ability to anticipate how forest change could impact rural livelihoods and could result in management interventions detrimental to vulnerable groups. The objective of this study was therefore to explore links between woodland cover, provisioning ecosystem service availability and household environmental income by applying a novel interdisciplinary approach in six villages on a gradient of woodland resource availability in Zimbabwe. We firstly use techniques from quantitative ethnobotany to score the species underpinning six locally important provisioning ecosystem services, and combine these scores with data from 80 tree survey plots to establish provisioning service availability. We then use income data from 91 households to explore relationships between provisioning service availability and household income portfolios. We find that villages with less woodland have lower availability of all studied ecosystem services and also a lower diversity of species underpinning service provision, but that there are no significant relationships between woodland resource availability and environmental income, livelihood diversity or intra-community income inequality in the case study area. We suggest that income portfolios are very resilient to woodland loss because households can still derive significant resources from woodlands which would be considered degraded in ecological terms and can draw upon kin networks which facilitate access to resources beyond village boundaries. The novel combination of approaches used in this study, particularly if applied at greater spatial and temporal scales, can provide valuable insight into the complexities of resource use in forest-agriculture mosaics.

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  • Pritchard, Rose & Grundy, Isla M. & van der Horst, Dan & Ryan, Casey M., 2019. "Environmental incomes sustained as provisioning ecosystem service availability declines along a woodland resource gradient in Zimbabwe," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 325-338.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:122:y:2019:i:c:p:325-338
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.05.008
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    4. Meyer, Maximilian & Hulke, Carolin & Kamwi, Jonathan & Kolem, Hannah & Börner, Jan, 2021. "Spatially heterogeneous effects of collective action on environmental dependence in the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area," 2021 Conference, August 17-31, 2021, Virtual 315018, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    5. Gamel Abdul-Nasser Salifu, 2019. "The Political Economy Dynamics of Rural Household Income Diversification: A Review of the International Literature," Research in World Economy, Research in World Economy, Sciedu Press, vol. 10(3), pages 273-290, December.
    6. Rong Wang & Jinlong Wang & Wenhao Chen, 2023. "The Coordinated Development of Ecosystem Services and Farming Household Livelihood Security: A Case Study of the Dongting Lake Area in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(14), pages 1-18, July.
    7. Simon Lhoest & Cédric Vermeulen & Adeline Fayolle & Pierre Jamar & Samuel Hette & Arielle Nkodo & Kevin Maréchal & Marc Dufrêne & Patrick Meyfroidt, 2020. "Quantifying the Use of Forest Ecosystem Services by Local Populations in Southeastern Cameroon," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(6), pages 1-22, March.
    8. Jagger, Pamela & Cheek, Jennifer Zavaleta & Miller, Daniel & Ryan, Casey & Shyamsundar, Priya & Sills, Erin, 2022. "The Role of Forests and Trees in Poverty Dynamics," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(C).
    9. Pritchard, Rose & Grundy, Isla M. & van der Horst, Dan & Dzobo, Nyaradzo & Ryan, Casey M., 2020. "Environmental resources as ‘last resort’ coping strategies following harvest failures in Zimbabwe," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).

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