Scientific studies of climate and meteorology focusing on India show significant increase in the variability and frequency of extreme precipitation events. The increased variability of weather patterns places a huge constraint on farmer's ability to make strategic agricultural practice decisions. In response, public and private agro-met information services disseminate agro-met information to farmers. Yet, studies still show that there are constraints related to access and understanding of the information. An agro-met information service is based on scientific input from meteorology coupled with agricultural information and this information package is disseminated to farmers. Based on a study in three villages in Maharashtra, India, we show that the relevance of agro-met information differs depending on the decision-making situation. Several factors play an important role in farmer's agricultural decision-making. The usefulness of the agro-met information from farmer perspectives depends on the access, salience, and credibility of the information. Some subscribers complained about the credibility and the salience of services, while others painted a more positive picture of the service, arguing that there was value in receiving such information. The subscribers mainly valued agro-met information for the ability to undertake precautionary actions. We found that agricultural decision-making was discussed in different arenas; these arenas represented possibilities for farmers to contextualize agro-met information and thereby translate information to timely and appropriate actions suited to the specific local context.
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.
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