Abstract
Identifying ecosystem services that are important to society can help decision-makers to prioritize specific services for protection. However, ecosystem services may be valued differently by different sections of society. This study sets out an approach for assessing the use and prioritization of freshwater ecosystem services by people in rural and urban areas in China. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 30 rural and 30 urban respondents in the same region of Shandong province. Respondents were asked about how they used their local river and to prioritize ecosystem services provided by the river. In addition, respondents were asked to state whether they would be prepared to pay to protect their local river. The rural community used more ecosystem services and prioritized them more highly than the urban community; probably because they interacted with them more frequently. The results of this study raise the question of whether there should be different ecosystem services protection goals for rural and urban regions, as well as highlighting potential trade-offs between ecosystem services prioritized by different sections of society.
Highlights
The ecosystem services framework combines ecology, economics and sociology into one unified idea and its central goal is to benefit human society (Costanza et al, 2014)
We investigated freshwater ecosystem services because they provide irreplaceable services to benefit human well-being and suffer from severe anthropogenic threats (Strayer and Dudgeon, 2010)
Rural women regularly washed their clothes in the local river
Summary
The ecosystem services framework combines ecology, economics and sociology into one unified idea and its central goal is to benefit human society (Costanza et al, 2014). Interactions and trade-offs between ecological processes and functions mean that not all ecosystem services benefits can be delivered simultaneously at the same location and at the same time (Martin-Lopez et al, 2014). Managing ecosystems for the delivery of some ecosystem services may alter the provision of other services (Spash, 2015). Such trade-offs require decisions to be made regarding which ecosystem services are prioritized and protected where. How should ecosystem services be prioritized and whose prioritization should be used?
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