Assessing social values of ecosystem services in the Phewa Lake Watershed, Nepal

Background

Over 40 years, Community-Based Forestry has actively been practiced in Nepal, which aims to integrate human societies, social values and biophysical systems.  Using the Phewa watershed as a case-study, this paper evaluates the social values for ecosystem services and their importance to different stakeholders. This approach seeks to assess quantitatively how diferent users value the different ecosystem services perceived from a specific ecosystem. Authors carried on interviews and group sessions to assess according to a numeric scale different ecosystem services.

Conclusions & Takeaways

The paper found that the valued ecosystem services greatly differed among local and wider users and among demographical groups. They also highlight that trade-offs typically exist between provisioning and regulating services and synergies among regulating, habitat and cultural services. The paper concludes by pointing out the importance the evaluative tool employed in this study and the ways it can address trade-offs and dynamism that come with prioritizing benefits from an ecosystem.