Status, approaches, and challenges of ecosystem services exploration in Ethiopia: A systematic review

Abstract

Healthy ecosystems benefit humans in various forms, and ecosystem services (ESs) are the benefits reaped by people in various forms. However, increase in global human population and the resulting anthropogenic activities have led to rapid alterations in the composition, structure, and functions of the ecosystems as well as their degradation, increasing the losses associated with ES values. Livelihoods of people in several developing countries are highly dependent on their surrounding ecosystems and the services they provide. Therefore, management and reduction of ecosystem modification are required; especially in developing countries, this requirement is even more urgent. In Africa, ecosystem-based studies are limited and in still in their initial stages. Hence, this paper examines dynamic Ethiopian ESs in Africa from 2010 to 2019 based on a systematic bibliometric analysis of articles from the Scopus database using a set of standard criteria. In total, 73 articles were published on Africa, including Ethiopia. The results reveal that the spatial distribution trend of ES studies is unevenly distributed, where most studies were conducted in the central highlands, followed by southwestern regions, with no studies on the western part of Ethiopia. Regarding service providing units (SPUs), the urban ecosystem and agroecosystem accounted for 25% and mixed ecosystems accounted for 20%. Furthermore, a total of 67 specific ESs were investigated by researchers, among which 81.25% of the specific ESs were classified into two ES categories. Provisioning ES (40.29%) dominated across all of the ES types while the cultural ES (5.97%) type has received little attention. Based on keywords, ESs were strongly linked to South Africa, Ethiopia, and biodiversity. In terms of the co-authorship network, authors from the United Kingdom, Italy, Burkina Faso, the Netherlands, and Germany actively collaborated with the Ethiopian researchers, and approximately 50% of the studies were aimed at estimating the value of the ESs through an applied mixed mode of ES study approaches. This review indicates that, due to land use land cover (LULC) changes from 1985 to 2015, approximately US$ 149.5 million or US$ 4.98 million annually in ES values were lost. Moreover, there is a critical need to extend ES studies to entire Ethiopia to capture the spatial and socioeconomic uniqueness of various ecosystems and focus more on multiple ES categories as a means to address ES synergies and provide unit-services to strengthen the relations among benefiting areas in Ethiopia.