The degradation of any ecosystem services (ES) and the benefits human being enjoy from nature freely involve multifaceted processes such as those in-built environment.
Rangeland conditions in the Lesotho highland dam catchment areas is important for local livelihoods and regional water supply. We investigated changes in land cover and condition from 1991 (before construction) to 2013, using Landsat imagery. The Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) decreased in the catchment areas, while increasing within two protected areas. NDVI decreases were greatest close to the dams and in the high altitude summer grazing areas.
It is commonly asserted that the successful management of common property resources (CPR), and by extension, the provision of public goods such as biodiversity and carbon, requires the devolution of control to local communities. However, where trust in community institutions is low, the intrinsic motivation to co-operate may be diminished. In this study, we carried out surveys and framed field experiments on the introduction of payments for ecosystem services (PES) to Namibia’s communal conservancies, established under the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programme.
For nearly three decades, the Whitfield (1992) characterisation scheme served as a reference framework to type South African estuaries. We outline a revised ecosystem classification scheme that incorporates biogeographical zonation and introduces new types. Coastal outlets were re-categorised as estuaries or micro-systems. For functional estuaries, the Estuarine Lakes, Estuarine Bays and Predominantly Open Estuary types were largely retained. New types are Estuarine Lagoons and Arid Predominantly Closed Estuaries.
Coral reefs provide a multitude of goods and services, some of which are difficult to value due to their intangible nature and the absence of markets to ascribe their relative worth. The coral reefs of Sodwana Bay on the northeast coast of South Africa provide several ecological goods and services, of which only two are considered here: namely, sediment generation and sediment entrapment. Both are deemed essential to the functioning of the Sodwana Bay economy.
With many species predicted to respond to a changing climate by shifting their distribution to climatically suitable areas, the effectiveness of static protected areas (PAs) is in question. The Madagascan PA network area has quadrupled over the past 15 years, and, although conservation planning techniques were employed to prioritise suitable areas for protection during this process, climate change impacts were not considered.
Climate change could potential have significant impacts on the global tourism industry through changes in accessibility, comfort levels, and geographic or seasonal changes to attractions. Global and regional studies based on climate indices suggest that there will be global shifts in tourism, with many of the currently warmer areas potentially experiencing decreases in tourism. These include much of the global south, where nature-based tourism is both an important contributor to economic output and believed to be vulnerable to climate change.
After at least two millennia of human–wildlife conflict over the predation of livestock in South Africa1, the recently completed scientific assessment on livestock predation2 (PredSA) brings the power of a formal scientific assessment to focus on the topic. PredSA represents a global first in terms of applying this increasingly recognised approach to informing policy to the issue of livestock predation at a national level.
This paper presents an environmental flow methodology that was developed to accommodate shallow, highly dynamic micro-tidal estuaries found along the wave-dominated coast of South Arica. This method differs to most other approaches that primarily focus on larger permanently open systems having unrestricted inlets.
The natural conservation of coastal lagoons is important not only for their ecological importance, but also because of the valuable ecosystem services they provide for human welfare and wellbeing. Coastal lagoons are shallow semi-enclosed systems that support important habitats such as wetlands, mangroves, salt-marshes and seagrass meadows, as well as a rich biodiversity. Coastal lagoons are also complex social-ecological systems with ecosystem services that provide livelihoods, wellbeing and welfare to humans.