An Environmental Accounting Approach to Valuing the Services of Natural Forests and Woodlands in Swaziland

Abstract

Economists and statisticians constructing the national income accounts usually overlook the many benefits derived by communities from natural forests and woodlands. This study attempted to impute a value for the ecosystem services of these resources in Swaziland employing an environmental accounting framework. The current measure of national income was found to underestimate GDP by 2% and under value national savings by 10% by not accounting for the flow and asset values of natural forests and woodlands. The study also revealed a very high dependence of the rural communities in Swaziland on natural forests and woodlands for their livelihoods as they derive more than 50% of the value of total household consumption expenditure from these resources. These results clearly indicate the significant contribution to and crucial role these resources play in the lives and wellbeing of the Swazi people and hence the importance of prudent management and utilisation of this resource sector.

Direct-use Values of Non-Timber Forest Products from two areas on the Transkei Wild Coast

“…This included the opportunistic harvesting of wild mushrooms and wild honey. The use of indigenous poles for housing was found to be very low, as was also reported in the work of Lieberman (1997) and Shackleton et al (2004a), but contrary to that of Ngwenya and Hassan (2005) in Swaziland. Grass brooms were widely used (97 % of households), but had a direct-use value of less than R10.00 per annum (Shackleton et al, 2004a).…”

“…Fuelwood was a high contributor to the total value, being the highest resource at Cwebe and second-highest at Ntubeni. This is typical of previous studies (Dovie et al, 2002;Shackleton & Shackleton, 2004a, b;Ngwenya & Hassan, 2005). Because of the high demand and value it is imperative that the fuelwood resource be appropriately managed.…”

“…Most of the literature is based on work in tropical ecosystems (Shackleton et al, in 2007). Of the few studies to date in southern Africa, natural resources have been shown to contribute between 15 % and 28 % of total livelihood accruals (Shackleton et al, 2007), frequently equaling, if not surpassing, the contributions from arable agriculture and livestock (Shackleton et al, 2001;Dovie et al, 2002;Ngwenya & Hassan, 2005). This finding needs to be tested across a variety of settings in South Africa.…”

“…Secondly, if natural resources do make up such a significant proportion of livelihoods, should they not be considered as a possible vehicle for poverty alleviation interventions? The corollary of the second question is that if use of natural resources became ecologically unsustainable at a particular site or region, then poverty will deepen but the causes will go undetected via formal statistics and economic measures at both the local and national levels (Ngwenya & Hassan, 2005). This requires longitudinal surveys of a specific site, in which the natural resource component is considered along with other livelihood streams.…”

Lightning fatalities in Swaziland: 2000–2007

“…Almost three quarters of the population lives in the Highveld (32%) and Middleveld (40%) (Central Statistics Office 2008), the eco-climatic zones of high thunderstorm activity. Most of the population is living under low socioeconomic conditions, with two-thirds of the population living below the poverty line and more than half the working population unemployed (Ngwenya and Hassan 2005). In Swaziland, similar to other developing countries, a large proportion of rural dwelling structures have very little or no modern engineering input (Goliger and Retief 2007).…”