Suchergebnisse

The past decade has brought substantial transition to South Africa. The introduction of democracy in 1994 has yielded important political and socioeconomic transformations affecting millions of people. Here, we explore the impact of institutional and structural changes on the availability and management of fuelwood, a key natural resource in rural South Africa. As in other developing regions, many households depend on natural resources for both sustenance and energy needs. Drawing on qualitative data from 32 interviews, our objective is to describe, from the perspective of the respondents, (1) resource scarcity, (2) the underlying causes of resource scarcity, (3) the role of traditional authority in managing resources, and (4) strategies used by community members in the face of resource scarcity. The results have important implications for the well-being of both social and natural systems in many transitional, rural developing societies.

"Scholarly understanding of human migration's environmental dimensions has greatly advanced in the past several years, motivated in large part by public and policy dialogue around 'climate migrants'. The research presented here advances current demographic scholarship both through its substantive interpretations and conclusions, as well as its methodological approach. We examine temporary rural South African outmigration as related to household-level availability of proximate natural resources. Such 'natural capital' is central to livelihoods in the region, both for sustenance and as materials for market-bound products. The results demonstrate that the association between local environmental resource availability and outmigration is, in general, positive: households with higher levels of proximate natural capital are more likely to engage in temporary migration. In this way, the general findings support the 'environmental surplus' hypothesis that resource security provides a foundation from which households can invest in migration as a livelihood strategy. Such insight stands in contrast to popular dialogue, which tends to view migration as a last resort undertaken only by the most vulnerable households. As another important insight, our findings demonstrate important spatial variation, complicating attempts to generalize migration-environment findings across spatial scales. In our rural South African study site, the positive association between migration and proximate resources is actually highly localized, varying from strongly positive in some villages to strongly negative in others. We explore the socio-demographic factors underlying this 'operational scale sensitivity'. The cross-scale methodologies applied here offer nuance unavailable within more commonly used global regression models, although also introducing complexity that complicates story-telling and inhibits generalizability." (author's abstract)

OBJECTIVES : (1) To evaluate how ecosystem services may be utilized to either reinforce or fracture the planning and development practices that emerged from segregation and economic exclusion; (2) To survey the current state of ecosystem service assessments and synthesize a growing number of recommendations from the literature for renovating ecosystem service analyses. METHODS : Utilizing current maps of ecosystem service distribution in Bushbuckridge Local Municipality, South Africa, we considered how a democratized process of assessing ecosystem services will produce a more nuanced representation of diverse values in society and capture heterogeneity in ecosystem structure and function. RESULTS : We propose interventions for assessing ecosystem services that are inclusive of a broad range of stakeholders' values and result in actual quantification of social and ecological processes. We demonstrate how to operationalize a pluralistic framework for ecosystem service assessments. CONCLUSION : A democratized approach to ecosystem service assessments is a reimagined path to rescuing a poorly implemented concept and designing and managing future socialecological systems that benefit people and support ecosystem integrity. It is the responsibility of scientists who do ecosystem services research to embrace more complex, pluralistic frameworks so that sound and inclusive scientific information is utilized in decision-making. ; The National Science Foundation under Grant No. RCN 1140070. ; https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tehs20 ; am2019 ; Educational Psychology