Abstract
To support decision-making, benefit assessments have become an obligatory part of natural resource management. In this context, the ecosystem services (ES) framework has been widely adopted for identifying and assessing the values at stake, yet the concept ignores benefits from water and land use functions as important contributions for societal welfare. This paper aims to contribute knowledge for improved benefit assessments in human-modified landscapes, exemplified by watersheds regulated for the production of hydropower. Through a case study approach in two regulated watersheds in Norway, beneficiaries’ perceptions of the benefits associated with key watershed activities, i.e., hydropower production, kayaking, angling, and hiking, are presented. Considering the beneficiaries’ perspectives, we discuss the relative ability of economic, quantitative, and qualitative assessment methods to present benefits. The study shows that benefit assessments must be carried out on different scales of governance, as benefits are context and scale dependent. We argue for an approach which considers a balance of benefits obtained from ecosystem services, and from water and land use functions within ecological limits. The suitability of the ES framework for guiding benefit assessments in a human-modified landscape and its complementarity with the sustainability concept for informing local-level decision-making are discussed.
Highlights
The recent decade’s increasing emphasis on the need for benefit assessments as part of policy decisions has been driven by activities involving multiple pressures, multiple ecological issues, and competing social priorities [1]
The online survey on the attributes of benefit assessment methods and indicators included a total of 83 responses (41% response rate) which were distributed among the following categories: NGOs (25%), hydropower producers (23%), national level authorities, (18%), municipality level (18%), county level authorities (9%), and other (7%)
This paper presents perceptions of the benefits by different actors on local, regional and national levels regarding watercourses regulated for hydropower production
Summary
The recent decade’s increasing emphasis on the need for benefit assessments as part of policy decisions has been driven by activities involving multiple pressures, multiple ecological issues, and competing social priorities [1]. The contribution by ecosystem functions in benefit assessments were previously poorly acknowledged, implying the risk of unsustainable outcomes of measures and interventions Recognizing this shortcoming, a strategy for a global ecosystem assessment was developed in 1998 by WRI (World Resources Institute), UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme), the World Bank, and UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). Further driving the use of ES for guiding benefit assessments is the development of a standardized typology for ES in the EU through the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) [7,8] These initiatives have fostered a vast number of publications, and the ES framework has been widely adopted for identifying and weighting the social and ecological values which are at stake in management schemes. Authors have emphasized the need for a common vision on how to conceptualize ES within sustainability as an overarching normative goal [8,21,22]
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