How Ecosystem Services Knowledge and Values Influence Farmers' Decision-Making

Abstract

The ecosystem services (ES) concept has emerged and spread widely recently, to enhance the importance of preserving ecosystems through global change in order to maintain their benefits for human well-being. Numerous studies consider various dimensions of the interactions between ecosystems and land use via ES, but integrated research addressing the complete feedback loop between biodiversity, ES and land use has remained mostly theoretical. Few studies consider feedbacks from ecosystems to land use systems through ES, exploring how ES are taken into account in land management decisions. To fill this gap, we carried out a role-playing game to explore how ES cognition mediates feedbacks from environmental change on farmers' behaviors in a mountain grassland system. On a close to real landscape game board, farmers were faced with changes in ES under climatic and socio-economic scenarios and prompted to plan for the future and to take land management decisions as they deemed necessary. The outcomes of role-playing game were complemented with additional agronomic and ecological data from interviews and fieldwork. The effects of changes in ES on decision were mainly direct, i.e. not affecting knowledge and values, when they constituted situations with which farmers were accustomed. For example, a reduction of forage quantity following droughts led farmers to shift from mowing to grazing. Sometimes, ES cognitions were affected by ES changes or by external factors, leading to an indirect feedback. This happened when fertilization was stopped after farmers learned that it was inefficient in a drought context. Farmers' behaviors did not always reflect their attitudes towards ES because other factors including topographic constraints, social value of farming or farmer individual and household characteristics also influenced land-management decisions. Those results demonstrated the interest to take into account the complete feedback loop between ES and land management decisions to favor more sustainable ES management.

A multiscale gaming approach to understand farmer’s decision making in the boom of maize cultivation in Laos

“…Land degradation is recognized by farmers in their real-life situations, but often not acted upon because other necessities for livelihoods outweigh ecological concerns. These kinds of trade-offs have also been reported for mountainous farming environments in Europe, where farmers intended to support ecosystem functioning, but other, more influential factors (feasibility, profitability) overruled https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol23/iss2/art35/ their concerns for environmental degradation (Lamarque et al 2014). Findings of local games and interviews in our study suggest that the continued exploitation of land is seen as a bridging strategy until other competitive alternatives become available or feasible.…”

Managing soil functions for a sustainable bioeconomy—Assessment framework and state of the art

“…Monetary aspects of soil management are crucial for farmers acting as economic entities, albeit not the only factor. While a large amount of literature exists that deals with individual specific factors influencing farmers' decisionmaking (e.g., Lamarque, Meyfroidt, Nettier, & Lavorel, 2014;Lienhoop & Brouwer, 2015;Senger, Borges, & Machado, 2017), to be effective, governance has to be informed by the full suite of these factors. Much can be learned from the emerging field of behavioral environmental economics (Gsottbauer & van den Bergh, 2011).…”

Trends and approaches in the analysis of ecosystem services provided by grazing systems: A review

“…Natural heritage (NH) was apparently assessed in 25% of the papers, although it proved to be analysed as a cultural ES in only 6% of the papers (of 39 publications, four were eligible; Table ). In the papers excluded from the NH category of ES, the landscape was considered: (i) for the effects that it can have on biodiversity (e.g., Cole, Brocklehurst, Robertson, Harrison, & McCracken, ; Kearns & Oliveras, ; Lindborg et al., ; Littlewood, Stewart, & Woodcock, ; Sanderson et al., ); (ii) as support for improving or maintaining other ES, but not as an ES per se (e.g., Lavorel et al., , ; Schaldach et al., ); (iii) as an assessment scale for other ES (e.g., Hussain & Tschirhart, ; Kimoto et al., ; Medina‐Roldán, Paz‐Ferreiro, & Bardgett, ; Peringer et al., ); and (iv) for the effects that different drivers had on it without directly analysing the consequences on its cultural value (e.g., Cousins, Auffret, Lindgren, & Tränk, ; Lamarque, Meyfroidt, Nettier, & Lavorel, ; Schaich, Kizos, Schneider, & Plieninger, ). The limited number of papers dealing with the landscape as a cultural ES might be explained by the difficulty for the measurement of this aspect, and to the few currently available indicators (Feld et al., ; TEEB, ).…”