The Identification of Potential Resilient Estuary-based Enterprises to Encourage Economic Empowerment in South Africa: a Toolkit Approach

Abstract

and M. Mander. 2012. The identification of potential resilient estuary-based enterprises to encourage economic empowerment in South Africa: a toolkit approach. ABSTRACT. It has been argued that ecosystem services can be used as the foundation to provide economic opportunities to empower the disadvantaged. The Ecosystem Services Framework (ESF) approach for poverty alleviation, which balances resource conservation and human resource use, has received much attention in the literature. However, few projects have successfully achieved both conservation and economic objectives. This is partly due to there being a hiatus between theory and practice, due to the absence of tools that help make the transition between conceptual frameworks and theory, to practical integration of ecosystem services into decision making. To address this hiatus, an existing conceptual framework for analyzing the robustness of social-ecological systems was translated into a practical toolkit to help understand the complexity of socialecological systems (SES). The toolkit can be used by a diversity of stakeholders as a decision making aid for assessing ecosystem services supply and demand and associated enterprise opportunities. The toolkit is participatory and combines both a generic "top-down" scientific approach with a case-specific "bottom-up" approach. It promotes a shared understanding of the utilization of ecosystem services, which is the foundation of identifying resilient enterprises. The toolkit comprises four steps: (i) ecosystem services supply and demand assessment; (ii) roles identification; (iii) enterprise opportunity identification; and (vi) enterprise risk assessment, and was tested at two estuary study sites. Implementation of the toolkit requires the populating of preprogrammed Excel worksheets through the holding of workshops that are attended by stakeholders associated with the ecosystems. It was concluded that for an enterprise to be resilient, it must be resilient at an external SES level,which the toolkit addresses, and at an internal business functioning level, e.g., social dynamics among personnel, skills, and literacy levels. Although the toolkit does not address the internal resilience level of an enterprise, it proved helpful at indicating which enterprises show potential resilience given current SES conditions.

A new method for assessing river ecosystem services and its application to rivers in Scotland with and without nature conservation designations

“…All calculations were done using universally available Excel software. Excel spreadsheets have been used in other research that produced ecosystem service capacity scores (Bowd, Quinn, Kotze, Hay, & Mander, ; Large & Gilvear, ; Nordlund et al, ) and to estimate the contribution of habitats to ecosystem service supply (Christie & Rayment, ). A matrix was constructed listing the 20 river features and their reach scores (determined from the Google Earth ™ imagery using the scoring system outlined in Table ).…”

Toward an analytical framework for understanding complex social-ecological systems when conducting environmental impact assessments in South Africa

“…This development would require EIA authorization, and therefore the use of our framework in this context provided some insight into its potential utility as an EIA tool. The estuary is also important to local people who use it directly in maintaining their livelihoods (Bowd et al 2012). Following development and application of the method in this case study, we tested the transferability and utility of the SES-EA framework in a proposed wine estate development in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands of South Africa.…”

“…http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol20/iss1/art41/ a wide range of locations and can influence and/or are influenced by the ecosystem services supplied by the system. For example, local residents, tourists, neighboring communities, farmers, fishermen, and nongovernment organizations (Bowd et al 2012). We identified six proximity-based categories of resource user (Fig.…”

“…Adjacent coastal habitats, e.g., beaches, can also be viewed as an integral part of the estuary's ecological system. Estuary-linked ecosystem services supplied by the different habitats included food provision, hospitality, recreation, and flood attenuation (Bowd et al 2012). To enable these services to be derived from the habitats of the ecological system, transformations, e.g., bridges, roads, buildings, harvesting nets, and ploughed fields, need to have occurred.…”

Planning for the conservation and management of ecosystem services in Central Chile

“…areas that can be seen up to 65 times from viewpoints). This map was classified in a qualitative scale map using the natural breaks categories of the visibility raster map ranging from: very low (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12), low (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25), medium (26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37), high (38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49)…”