Societal evaluation of forest ecosystem services and their trade-offs in Catalonia.

Shankar Thapa.  2020. Societal evaluation of forest ecosystem services and their trade-offs in Catalonia. The University of Lleida School of Agrifood, Forestry Science and Engineering

Supervisors.

Dr. Mireia Pecurul Botines, CTFC 

Dr. Jose Antonio Bonet

Abstract

The concept of Ecosystem services (ES), simply defined as “the benefits people obtain from ecosystems” has been used widely for various purposes. The benefits from ESs are evaluated by using three value domains i.e., economic valuation, bio-physical/ecologic valuation and socio-cultural/social valuation. Former two value domains have been researched widely while socio-cultural/social valuation are scarce. Without the inclusion of socio-cultural aspects, the evaluation of ES cannot be holistic and realistic. This study is an attempt to understand how people evaluate and perceive the importance of forest ES and add more insights to the social valuation aspect of forest ecosystem services. The level of knowledge and awareness about forest, relative importance of different forest ecosystem services, effect of forest management for boosting one ES on other forest ESs and people’s priority to forest management objectives were studied and analysed. In addition, the factors affecting management priorities were also studied and analysed by using data collected from questionnaire survey in four provinces of Catalonia Region. Statistical tests and descriptive analyses were carried out and the results thus obtained were discussed. The results showed that the people were not much aware about the present state of forests, regulating forest ES were more valued than cultural and provisioning forest ES and most people perceived that management of one forest ES had positive effect on all other services (with some exceptions). The results also indicated that people’s priority for forest management was towards regulating services and factors such as gender, education, place of residence and ownership typology did make a difference towards management priorities of forest ES. Environmental education for better understanding of forest systems, more focus on forest management for regulating services in Catalonia and further studies with consideration of other factors including factors such as age, education, gender, ownership typology and place of residence are recommended.