A Socio-Ecological Understanding of Ecosystem Services and Their Benefits to Livelihoods: Insights from Semi-Arid West Africa and Southern Arizona

Abstract

Land degradation, the result of both climate change and other anthropogenic factors, is a complex environmental problem of serious concern in arid and semi-arid regions of the globe. Land degradation reduces land productivity and leads to losses of ecosystem services which threatens the long-term ecological and economic resilience and adaptive capacity of the ecosystem and the populations who depend on it. This issue is particularly acute in semi-arid regions where land constitutes the most important socio-economic and cultural resource for rural populations. Thus, managing the land in a sustainable manner is critical to people’s livelihood. Sustainable land management practices offer a range of techniques to reverse land degradation and enable land users to maximize the economic and social benefits from the land while maintaining the ecological functions of the land resources. In this dissertation I examine 1) the causal links between the ecosystem services provided by agroforestry and their contribution to livelihood resilience in semi-arid regions of West Africa; 2) the factors influencing smallholder farmers’ decision-making regarding the adoption of sustainable land management practices in northern Ghana to understand the complexities of farmers’ decision making and identify the barriers and constraints they face; 3) the steps necessary to build an on-the-ground network of stakeholders that can fulfill the functions of an early warning system to identify climate-induced tipping points to the socio-economic and ecological system them depend on. Through the lens of the co-production of ecosystem services, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the multidimensionality of livelihoods of rural communities in semi-arid regions of West African and Arizona and highlights the need for more engaged modes of research to build networks of societal partners to respond to tipping points through early warnings and identifies knowledge gaps that require future research.