Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 11, Issue 10, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0163476
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Funding
- Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
- Swedish Research Council (VR)
- Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship
- DST/NRF South African Research Chairs Initiative [93097]
- WISER project by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation program (ESPA) [NE/L001322/1]
- Department for International Development (DFID)
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
- Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/L001284/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [NE/L001284/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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We take a social-ecological systems perspective to investigate the linkages between ecosystem services and human well-being in South Africa. A recent paper identified different types of social-ecological systems in the country, based on distinct bundles of ecosystem service use. These system types were found to represent increasingly weak direct feed-backs between nature and people, from rural green-loop communities to urban red-loop societies. Here we construct human well-being bundles and explore whether the well-being bundles can be used to identify the same social-ecological system types that were identified using bundles of ecosystem service use. Based on national census data, we found three distinct well-being bundle types that are mainly characterized by differences in income, unemployment and property ownership. The distribution of these well-being bundles approximates the distribution of ecosystem service use bundles to a substantial degree: High levels of income and education generally coincided with areas characterised by low levels of direct ecosystem service use (or red-loop systems), while the majority of low well-being areas coincided with medium and high levels of direct ecosystem service use (or transition and green-loop systems). However, our results indicate that transformations from green-loop to red-loop systems do not always entail an immediate improvement in well-being, which we suggest may be due to a time lag between changes in the different system components. Using human well-being bundles as an indicator of social-ecological dynamics may be useful in other contexts since it is based on socio-economic data commonly collected by governments, and provides important insights into the connections between ecosystem services and human well-being at policy-relevant sub-national scales.
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