Ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes A study on farming and farmers in South Africa and Sweden

Rebecka Malinga

©Rebecka Malinga, Stockholm University 2016

ISBN 978-91-7649-506-3 (printed)

ISBN 978-91-7649-507-0 (pdf)

Printed in Sweden by Holmbergs, Malmö 2016

Distributor: Stockholm Resilience Centre

Cover photos: Top centre by E. Andersson

Abstract

Humanity is facing challenges of sustainably producing enough food for a growing population

without further eroding the world’s ecosystems. Transformation of natural habitats into agriculture

has resulted in opportunities for civilization, but has also led to land degradation and loss of

biodiversity, threatening the generation of ecosystem services. A better understanding of

interlinkages and trade-offs among ecosystem services, and the spatial scales at which services are

generated, used and interact, is needed in order to successfully inform land use policies. This

includes the need to develop transdisciplinary tools that can disentangle the relationships between

the supply of and demand for ecosystem services. This thesis investigates agricultural landscapes

as complex social-ecological systems, and uses a multi-method approach to assess ecosystem

service generation from different types of agricultural landscapes and to examine the social-

ecological nature of these services. More specifically, the thesis discusses the importance of

appropriate spatial scales, explores landscape change, integrates stakeholder knowledge and

develops tools to investigate supply and demand of multiple ecosystem services.

Paper I reviews the literature on ecosystem service mapping, revealing that services were mostly

mapped at intermediate spatial scales (municipality and province), and rarely at local scales

(farm/village). Although most of the reviewed studies used a resolution of 1 hectare or less, more

case-specific local scale mapping is required to unravel the fine-scale dynamics of ecosystem

service generation that are needed to inform landscape planning. To explore future uncertainties

and identify relevant ecosystem services in a study area, paper II builds alternative scenarios using

participatory scenario planning in the Upper Thukela region, South Africa. The paper compares

methods to select services for an ecosystem service assessment showing that scenario planning

added limited value for identifying ecosystem services, although it improved knowledge of the

study area and availed useful discussions with stakeholders. Papers III and IV combines social

and biophysical data to study the supply and demand of ecosystem services at farm- and landscape

level, through participatory mapping and expert assessments in the Upper Thukela region, South

Africa (paper III), and through in-depth interviews and biophysical surveys in Uppsala County,

Sweden (paper IV), including small-scale and large-scale farmers. Both papers find apparent

differences between the farmer groups in terms of the supply and the demand of services, and also

the capacity of the farmers to influence the generation of services (paper III). Paper IV further

establishes the importance of using multiple indicators combining social and biophysical data to

quantify and investigate the complex social-ecological nature of ecosystem services. A cross-case

comparison of ecosystem service bundles, using data from papers III and IV, finds similarities in

bundles generated in the large-scale systems, while the small-scale agriculture bundles varied. This

thesis provides new insights into the social-ecological generation of ecosystem services at fine

scales such as farm and landscape levels, and shows the importance of including the knowledge

of various stakeholders, combining different methods and tools to increase the understanding of

supply and demand of ecosystem services.

Table of content

List of papers ................................................................................................................................... v

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 6

Theoretical background ................................................................................................................... 8

Agricultural landscapes as social-ecological systems .............................................................................................. 8

Ecosystem service bundles in different agricultural landscapes ............................................................................ 10

The beneficiaries of ecosystem services ................................................................................................................ 11

Mapping ecosystem services.................................................................................................................................. 12

The supply and demand of ecosystem services...................................................................................................... 13

Scope of the thesis ......................................................................................................................... 14

Empirical approach ........................................................................................................................ 16

Study areas ............................................................................................................................................................. 16

KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa ........................................................................................................................... 16

Uppsala County, Sweden .................................................................................................................................. 18

Methods ................................................................................................................................................................. 19

Results and discussion ................................................................................................................... 22

Comparing different agricultural landscapes ......................................................................................................... 22

Cross-case comparison of ecosystem service supply ........................................................................................ 25

Mapping and assessing ecosystem services ........................................................................................................... 26

Mapping ecosystem services at relevant scales ................................................................................................ 27

Selecting ecosystem services ............................................................................................................................ 27

Ecosystem service categories............................................................................................................................ 28

Stakeholder participation .................................................................................................................................. 28

Reflections on the empirical approach and ways forward ..................................................................................... 29

On a personal note ............................................................................................................................................ 30

Conclusions ................................................................................................................................... 31

References ..................................................................................................................................... 32

Sammanfattning ............................................................................................................................. 38

Isifingqo ......................................................................................................................................... 41

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 43

Appendix ....................................................................................................................................... 45

List of papers

I. Malinga, R., Gordon, L.J., Jewitt, G., and Lindborg, R. 2015. Mapping

ecosystem services across scales and continents – A review. Ecosystem

Services 13:57-63.

II. Malinga, R., Gordon, L.J., Lindborg, R., and Jewitt, G. 2013. Using

participatory scenario planning to identify ecosystem services in changing

landscapes. Ecology and Society 18(4):10.

III. Malinga, R., Lindborg, R., Andersson, E., Jewitt, G., and Gordon, L.J. On the

other side of the ditch: The stark contrasts between smallholder and

commercial farmers’ contribution to multiple ecosystem services. Manuscript.

IV. Andersson, E., Nykvist, B., Malinga, R., Jaramillo, F., and Lindborg, R. 2015.

A social–ecological analysis of ecosystem services in two different farming

systems. Ambio 44(Suppl. 1):S102-S112.

The published papers are reprinted with the permission from the publishers.

6

Introduction

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the

mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-

tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying

bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came

from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares

for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich

green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their

nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the

streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many

fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones

cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men,

guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more.

Alan Paton, 1948. Cry, the Beloved Country

In 1948, Alan Paton described a landscape in the South African grasslands of the Drakensberg

mountain range near to where a major part of this thesis takes place. He first illustrated a healthy

agricultural landscape used for grazing cattle, managed sustainably to maintain healthy soils,

grasses and water streams. Viewed through the eyes of an ecosystem services scientist, he

envisioned a landscape that generated multiple ecosystem services for society, in a manner that

would sustain future generations. In the second paragraph he predicted the degradation of the same

landscape by the overuse of natural resources and mismanaged grasslands, where the land could

no longer provide society with the ecosystem services they depend on, and the bird species, the

titihoya (Vanellus melanopterus), had disappeared.

Ecosystem services are the benefits humans obtain through their interaction with nature (Ernstson

2013, Reyers et al. 2013). These benefits translate into several dimensions of people’s quality of

life, from human needs such as food, water, health, security, and livelihoods, to cultural and

spiritual meaning, and identity people acquire through their relationship with ecosystems

(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) 2005). Many of the ecosystem services on which

humans depend, are derived from agriculture. While the primary goal of agriculture is to produce

food, there is an increasing pressure on agricultural landscapes to deliver a broad range of

ecosystem services to meet the demands of multifaceted societies as well as those from a growing

global population (Foley et al. 2005, Bindraban and Rabbinge 2012). Societies and their

composition of beneficiaries desire different sets of services (Biggs et al. 2015), which link to

various aspects of human well-being; from mere survival to maintaining certain chosen lifestyles.

Agricultural landscapes, seen as coupled social-ecological systems, result from the interplay

between the biophysical and the social environment that constitute the landscape (Parrott and

Meyer 2012, box 1). A combination of factors such as climate, geology and ecology as well as

management practices, technology, skills, institutions and societal demand, will hence result in the

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supply of ecosystem services within an agricultural landscape (Swinton et al. 2007, Kroll et al.

2012, Huntsinger and Oviedo 2014). The generation of these ecosystem services do not operate in

isolation from one another. Instead, they are either interconnected by corresponding in various

ways to different driving forces (i.e. climate change or management interventions) or through the

interaction with other services (Bennett et al. 2009). While some services may be enhanced by a

specific driver, other services may respond adversely and decrease. The composition of services

from a landscape or given land unit, will consequently alter as a result of the driving forces at play.

In this thesis I aim to deepen the understanding of the generation of multiple ecosystem services

in agricultural landscapes. I particularly focus on agricultural landscapes that provide a diverse set

of ecosystem services and include different farming intensities and farming cultures. I apply an

integrative approach capturing both the biophysical and social components of ecosystem services

to compare supply and demand of ecosystem services in small-scale and large-scale agriculture

from two different case studies. In the following section I outline the theoretical foundation from

which the topics of this thesis have emerged and highlight the research gaps the thesis aims to

address. I then summarise the scope of the thesis before introducing the study areas and methods

used. In the next section I summarise the findings from the four papers, followed by an in-depth

discussion on the implication of the results and ways in which this research could develop further.

Box 1. Defining the agricultural landscape

While scale is an important feature when studying a changing landscape, there is no particular scale

that is correct when referring to a landscape (Lindenmayer and Fischer 2006). The agricultural

landscapes in focus will alter in spatial scale throughout this thesis, and will be defined when needed.

Also the definitions of the term landscape vary in different contexts (Fry 2001). When reading this

thesis it is relevant to envision a landscape as “a spatial area constituting of several farms or small

villages that are or have been interconnected. A landscape includes a mosaic of different rural

environments and habitats, and covers at least one to a few square kilometres. In this area, physical

as well as immaterial and human aspects are included as features of the landscape“ (Lindborg et al.

2008). I see the farmers as the primary actors in the agricultural landscapes making them central to

this thesis (figure 1).

8

Theoretical background

Agricultural landscapes as social-ecological systems

Almost 40% of the world’s terrestrial surface has been transformed into agriculture, either for

cultivation of crops or for grazing of livestock, enabling tremendous opportunities for humanity

and increased economic development (Ramankutty et al. 2008). Converting pristine lands into

agriculture has however been identified as one of the main causes for global land degradation and

biodiversity loss over the past decades (Tilman et al. 2001), consequently degrading the

ecosystems’ ability to generate many other ecosystem services. The decline of the generation of

ecosystem services is alarming throughout the world (MA 2005, IPCC 2014). Food production has

been targeted at the often unintended cost of other services, e.g. non-cultivated provisioning,

regulating and cultural services (Foley et al. 2005, MA 2005, Müller et al. 2016). Humanity now

faces the challenge of catering for a growing population, with limited resources at hand, and the

pressing need to find ways towards long-term sustainable agriculture (Rockström et al. 2016).

While an increased understanding of the undesirable outcomes of agriculture provide opportunities

to deal with these challenges, there are still important gaps that need to be addressed. In order to

improve land management and land use strategies we need to fully understand the interactions and

trade-offs among multiple ecosystem services, and how multifunctionality in agricultural

landscapes can increase human well-being.

Food production derives from fundamental ecological and biological processes, such as soil

nutrients, microorganisms, pollination, temperature, day light and water, and the genetic origin of

the species used within agriculture (crop and livestock varieties). However, these biophysical

elements also require human inputs to produce food (Biggs et al. 2015). Societal needs,

institutions, technology and skills are examples of socioeconomic characteristics that are part of

food production systems and shape the agricultural landscapes and the services they deliver

(Reyers et al. 2013). This thesis asserts the notion that agricultural landscapes are intertwined

social-ecological systems (SES) (figure 1), where the social system and the ecological system are

inseparable. The SES perspective of the agricultural landscape views farmlands as going beyond

an entity of land that produces food for people to eat. By improving the knowledge on the complex

dynamics between the social and ecological aspects of agricultural landscapes, and the ecosystem

services they generate, land management and environmental policy can focus on increasing the

multifunctionality of those landscapes, i.e. to diversify the portfolio of ecosystem services

sustained by the landscapes to society (Foley et al. 2005, Parrott and Meyer 2012). Viewing

agricultural landscapes as SES also acknowledges the landscapes as complex adaptive systems

that constantly change, both gradually and abruptly (Walker et al. 2004, Folke 2006). This

complexity requires tools that take the various components and characteristics of a SES into

account. Ecosystem service assessments that do not consider the temporal dynamics in a changing

landscape may soon be outdated and encounter undesirable surprises (paper II). A tool for dealing

with change and complexity is scenario planning and it has increasingly been applied in

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environmental management and social-ecological systems research in general (Carpenter et al.

2006, Oteros-Rozas et al. 2015) and ecosystem service research in particular (Plieninger et al.

2013a, Reed et al. 2013).

Figure 1. The figure illustrates the agricultural landscape as a social-ecological system supplying multiple

ecosystem services to society. Farmers, being the main actors in the agricultural landscape, work along

with socioeconomic and biophysical factors to mangage their landscapes according to the demand from

society, themselves and their families.

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Ecosystem service bundles in different agricultural landscapes

Different kinds of agricultural landscapes generate different kinds of ecosystem services. There

are many studies that compare different kinds of agricultural systems and the services they

generate, for example conventional monoculture farming vs organic farming, and the effects that

intensification of agriculture has on biodiversity and ecosystem services (Björklund et al. 1999,

Haas et al. 2001, Kleijn et al. 2009, Kremen and Miles 2012). A few publications present

comparative analyses between small-scale and large-scale agriculture, and focus on aspects such

as: productivity (Lele and Agarwal 1990); soil degradation and soil loss (Essiet 1990);

environmental impact from palm oil plantations (Lee et al. 2014); income after adoption to cotton

production (Gouse et al. 2003); birds and plants species richness and assemblages (Andersson and

Lindborg 2014) and adaptation to climate change (Wilk et al. 2011). However, none of these

examples provide comparisons between multiple ecosystem services associated with agricultural

landscapes but focus on single services. Assessing multiple ecosystem services simultaneously is

required to understand the interrelations between services, how services respond to drivers of

change such as management innovations, and how the alteration of one service affects other

services (Bennett et al. 2009).

Targeted landscape management practices which respond to the demand for particular ecosystem

services by certain beneficiaries will unavoidably result in trade-offs (Rodriguez et al. 2006,

Bennett et al. 2009, King et al. 2015, Schoon et al. 2015). Examples are upstream food production

causing reduced water provision and other ecosystem services downstream (Gordon et al. 2010),

historical clearing of land for agricultural crop production and pastures leading to severe

salinization of the lands and reduced biodiversity, productivity and livelihoods for descendant

generations (Briggs and Taws 2003, Islam et al. 2015), and biodiversity conservation resulting in

reduced access to natural resources and livelihoods for local communities (Benjaminsen and

Bryceson 2012). Understanding these trade-offs is an important part of ecosystem service

management, and useful approaches to investigate the extent and complexity of ecosystem service

trade-offs and multifunctionality need to be further developed. Already in 2005, Foley and others

presented a conceptual framework using flower diagrams to compare ecosystem service generation

from three different theoretical landscapes, illustrating the differences in ecosystem service

generation among those land uses (figure 2). While these well-cited flower diagrams are thought

provoking and useful for highlighting the challenges in terms of trade-offs between ecosystem

services in different landscapes (Parrott and Meyer 2012, Helfenstein and Kienast 2014, Paudyal

et al. 2015), they are both hypothetical and highly simplified, and neglect many of the ecosystem

services generated in a diversity of agricultural landscapes. An increasing number of studies

provide empirical assessments of multiple ecosystem services and their interactions from real

landscapes (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010, Maes et al. 2012, Martín-López et al. 2012, Turner et

al. 2014, Queiroz et al. 2015, Früh-Müller et al. 2016), contributing to an improved understanding

of multifunctionality, and disentangling the mechanisms behind the bundling of ecosystem

services in certain land uses, landscape types or regions. The methodologies used in these studies

vary in terms of spatial scale, data collection and analysis, spatial units, and what ecosystem

services and indicators are assessed, challenging the possibilities for cross-case comparisons

(Queiroz et al. 2015). However, the studies highlight the context-dependence of drivers in

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Figure 2. Conceptual framework for comparing land use and trade-offs of ecosystem services. Three

hypothetical landscapes are compared where the length of the petals illustrate the extent of ecosystem

service generation. (Source: Foley et al. 2005. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.)

ecosystem service generation, calling for more empirical evidence in this relatively new strain of

ecosystem service research, at various scales. In this thesis, I use results from papers III and IV

to present a farm- and landscape scale comparison of multiple ecosystem services visualised as

flower diagrams, from contrasting agricultural systems (small-scale and large-scale agriculture)

from two different case study areas.

The beneficiaries of ecosystem services

The ecosystem services generated within the agricultural landscapes will reach society as different

kinds of benefits, ranging from direct benefits such as food intake to income generating benefits

and regulating processes important for these benefits, such as pollination and erosion regulation

(Daw et al. 2011). Agricultural landscapes involve a wide range of beneficiaries: land owners or

land managers who through their farming practices shape the landscapes; people living within the

agricultural landscapes and who benefit from it but who do not directly manage the land; visitors

who enjoy the agricultural landscapes for recreation and amenities and other beneficiaries who

benefit from the services generated in the landscapes without being physically connected to the

place. A society contains a diverse set of beneficiaries, from different socioeconomic and

sociocultural groups, which may lead to unequal access and asymmetric resource use (Schoon et

al. 2015, paper III). Consequently, stakeholder involvement, where local perspectives of

ecosystems are taken into account, is an important part of ecosystem service assessments when

taking societal injustices into consideration (Folke et al. 2005, Cowling et al. 2008). A fair

representation of beneficiaries, cultures and social constructs can best be achieved by including an

12

extensive array of stakeholders (Menzel and Teng 2009, Reyers et al 2010, Björklund et al. 2012,

Elbakidze et al. 2015). Local, indigenous as well as practitioner knowledge, has proven

complementary to integrate with scientific knowledge for instance in sustainable ecosystem

management (Tengö et al. 2014, Gaspare et al. 2015). Seppelt et al. (2011) suggested that

stakeholder involvement is a method for relating ecosystem function to human well-being “to gain

a wider picture, to ground-truth academic possibilities and to provide a first estimate of which

measures of ecosystem management would be looked upon favorably by members of the public”.

The non-material and intangible values of ecosystems, called cultural ecosystem services (MA

2005, TEEB 2010), are pivotal when considering a diverse set of beneficiaries, cultures and social

constructs (Daniel at al. 2012, Plieninger et al. 2015). Most cultural services are both directly

experienced and subconsciously valued, in contrast to other services. The identification and

valuing of many cultural services therefore require participatory approaches (MA 2005, Daniel el

al. 2012, Hernández-Morcillo et al. 2013, Plieninger et al. 2015). Papers II, III and IV integrate

local and scientific knowledge to capture the perspectives of a wide range of beneficiaries, and

seeks to include a wide range of ecosystem services, including cultural ecosystem services. The

inclusion of cultural services other than recreation and tourism will contribute towards filling a

gap in the understanding of cultural ecosystem services and their importance for human well-being

(Seppelt et al. 2011, Plieninger et al. 2013b).

Mapping ecosystem services

Spatial quantification and mapping of ecosystem services has been recognised as an important tool

for scientists and decision-makers to assess and communicate ecosystem conditions and the

ecosystem services provided at various scales (Burkhard et al. 2013). The scientific literature

presenting mapping tools, models, indicators and decision support systems has expanded

tremendously over the past couple of decades (Egoh et al. 2012, Martínez-Harms and Balvanera

2012, Maes et al. 2016, paper I). There are many different mapping approaches, as well as new

techniques and models that aim to better inform policy (Crossman et al. 2013b). Maps that build

on primary data and measurements, as well as remote sensing observations, are more accurate than

those relying on secondary data and proxies (Crossman et al. 2013a). However, the lack of primary

data and resources to carry out field surveys are common limiting factors that force studies to rely

on secondary data (Eigenbrod et al. 2010). Land use proxies are commonly used to estimate

ecosystem service generation, either as simple assumptions where a certain land use type is

considered to generate a specific service or groups of services (Maes et al. 2016) or included in

more advanced models with several variables and/or in combination with expert opinion of

selected stakeholders with certain expertise (Jacobs et al. 2015). The importance of spatial scale

when assessing and managing ecosystem services and their interactions is unanimously

emphasised among scholars. Yet, much remains unknown in terms of at what spatial scales

services should ultimately be studied (Raudsepp-Hearne and Peterson 2016). The underlying

ecological processes that generate ecosystem services operate at different scales, as do the external

social and ecological driving forces (Potschin and Haines-Young 2011). The purpose of the study,

including which components or aspects of ecosystem services are aimed to be captured, determine

which spatial scale and mapping approach(es) is(are) most suitable (paper I).

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The supply and demand of ecosystem services

Despite the development of ecosystem service frameworks to make them more useful for policy

and decision making (e.g. MA 2005, TEEB 2010), and a rapid advancement in mapping

methodologies, there are still some important aspects of the ecosystem service concept that need

more attention (Daw et al. 2016, Maes et al. 2016). For instance, the differences between what

services potentially can be produced in a given piece of land, what services are available and used

by different beneficiaries, and what services are desired or needed, are often casually handled in

the ecosystem service literature (Villamagna et al. 2013). In other words, ecosystem service studies

do not always explicitly describe or define which aspect(s) of ecosystem services they aim to assess

(Wolff et al. 2015). The terms for the hierarchical elements of an ecosystem service chain, i.e.

from ecosystems, via flows of services from ecosystems to beneficiaries, and to the contributions

that the benefits bring to human well-being, are used differently within the various frameworks,

and within the greater scientific community (Villamagna et al. 2013, Daw et al. 2016). Villamagna

et al. (2013) provide a useful overview of the inconsistency of the use of these terms within the

ecosystem service literature. They find that terms like: capacity; potential supply; ecosystem

potential and function; stocks and provision, are all used interchangeably to refer to the capacity

of an ecosystem to provide a service. Furthermore, the terms: flow; benefit; supply; demand and

provision, are used to describe the benefits actually delivered to people. Lastly, the terms societal

demand and sociocultural preferences refer to the needs and preferences of beneficiaries

(Villamagna et al. 2013). The demand of services (i.e. needs and preferences) has also been termed

‘perceived ecosystem service supply’ (De Vreese et al. 2016) and ‘needs, gaps and aspiration’

(Daw et al. 2016). While the discrepancy of the use of terms is inevitable given the diversity of

ecosystem frameworks and their various ways of conceptualizing ecosystem services (Wolff et al.

2015), the components must be properly defined in order to select the most suitable indicators and

methods for quantification, as well as to improve the application of the analyses. Although the

potential supply of services, with land use and land cover as proxies, is most commonly mapped

(Egoh et al. 2012, Martínez-Harms and Balvanera 2012, Crossman et al. 2013b), there is a growing

body of literature presenting assessments of the actual supply of ecosystem services to

beneficiaries, as well as the demand and societal preferences (Wolff et al. 2015, Maes et al. 2016).

Separate measures of the different components of ecosystem service delivery are needed to

understand the social-ecological nature of ecosystem services, which includes the supply of and

the demand for multiple ecosystem services (Villamagna et al. 2013, papers III and IV).

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Scope of the thesis

Despite tremendous methodological and conceptual improvements, the multifaceted field of

ecosystem service research still contains gaps and challenges that need to be addressed. This thesis

combines social and biophysical data to improve the understanding of the social-ecological nature

of ecosystem services and covers different levels of stakeholder involvement, ranging from local

to regional (figure 3). It also encompasses various spatial scales of analysis, from a literature

review at a global scale, to two local case studies in South Africa and Sweden, at farm to landscape

scales (figure 3). The study areas were chosen to include agricultural landscapes that provide a

diverse set of ecosystem services, farming intensities and farming cultures. South Africa and

Sweden were specifically chosen to represent two areas geographically distanced from one

another, in countries within different climatic regions and with different socioeconomic positions,

in order to explore whether similar patterns of ecosystem service generation could be detected

between the two systems despite the fundamentally different contexts.

The complexity of a social-ecological system such as an agricultural landscape and its intertwined

social and ecological components clearly calls for integrated, explorative methods that can tackle

the various dynamics of ecosystem service supply and demand at relevant scales. The thesis starts

off with paper I, which examines the ecosystem services mapping literature in terms of what

services are mapped, where in the world and at what spatial scale the mapping is carried out. The

rest of the thesis explores the generation of multiple ecosystem services through the perspectives

of stakeholders, foremost farmers, in contrasting, changing, agricultural landscapes. Paper II

applies an iterative scenario planning approach with multi-level stakeholders, from local to

regional levels (e.g. farmers, practitioners, officials, and researchers), to develop alternative

scenarios and to identify relevant ecosystem services in the Upper Thukela region, KwaZulu-

Natal, South Africa. It also explores the challenges and opportunities that a rapid changing

agricultural landscape may face twenty years into the future. Paper III combines social and

biophysical data to map ecosystem services in the same study area. Specifically, supply and

demand of ecosystem services are mapped using participatory mapping and in-depth interviews

including small-scale and large-scale farmers, and expert interpretation of biophysical data

previously collected in the study area. Paper III also discusses the capacity of the farmers from

the different farmer groups to maintain the supply and meet their demands for ecosystem services.

To contrast the socioeconomic and climatic prerequisites in South Africa, this thesis uses a second

study area, Uppsala County, Sweden (paper IV). Similar to paper III, it investigates the supply

and demand of ecosystem services by using a mixed-method approach including multiple social

and biophysical indicators to quantify a wide range of services in contrasting agricultural

landscapes. Finally, drawing on the results from papers III and IV, I use flower diagrams to

visualise bundles of ecosystem service supply in different kinds of agricultural landscapes from

the two case study areas.

15

This thesis explores the following overarching questions:

1. What are the differences in terms of bundles of ecosystem services between different

agricultural landscapes (such as between small-scale, low-intensive and large-scale, high-

intensive agriculture, and between different parts of the world)? Are the differences more

apparent within or between the case study areas? (papers III and IV)

2. How do the relationships between ecosystem service supply and demand manifest

differently in different agricultural landscapes? (papers III and IV)

3. How can stakeholder involvement and participatory methods improve insights into

ecosystem service assessments? (papers I, II, III, and IV)

Figure 3. Spatial scale of assessment (x-axis), level of stakeholder involvement (y-axis) and types of data

included in the four papers.

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Empirical approach

Study areas

The main part of the research in this thesis was conducted in the South African Drakensberg, in

the upper parts of the Thukela River Catchment (figure 4:1, papers II and III). Paper IV used the

south-central parts of Sweden, Uppsala County, as study area (figure 4:2). The comparison

between small-scale, low-intensive and large-scale, high-intensive agriculture is principal to both

study areas, although the terminology used to describe the systems in the three papers, and in the

thesis, differ. In paper II, mostly the terms ‘small-scale subsistence’, and ‘large-scale commercial’

farmers were used, while paper III used ‘smallholder’ and ‘commercial’ farmers. Although, the

terms subsistence and smallholder farmers are often used interchangeably in much of the academic

and policy literature, the term smallholder is more suitable to describe the small-scale farmers in

the South African study area (papers II and III) since ‘smallholder’ mostly refer to low-intensive

small-scale farmers in developing countries, using mainly family labour (Morton 2007). Paper IV

used mainly the terms ‘low-intensive’ and ‘high-intensive’ agriculture. Throughout the remainder

of this thesis I use the terms ‘small-scale’ and large-scale’ for the two farmer groups in both

Sweden and South Africa. It is however important to stress, that it is not simply the size of the

farm, or the intensity of the agricultural production that determine the generation of ecosystem

services in the various landscapes. Sociocultural-economic factors contribute greatly to shape the

agricultural landscapes, such as economic and social capital, skills, policies and legislation,

cultural preferences and lifestyle choices.

KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

The study area is located in the Drakensberg mountain range, in the upper part of the Thukela

River catchment, South Africa (figure 4:1, papers II and III) The mean annual precipitation

ranges from around 550 millimetres per year in the lower valley regions, to 2000 millimetres per

year in parts of the Drakensberg Mountains, with an altitude of 3000 meters above sea level (Lynch

2004). The region has two small towns, Bergville and Winterton, although the majority of the

population is rural. The land is mainly used for commercial, privately owned agriculture with large

crop fields and grazing areas, or traditional Zulu villages presenting a mosaic of small crop fields

and communal grazing areas. Small-scale and large-scale farmers are situated right next to one

another since generations back but are characterised by highly contrasting farming intensities,

management practices, ethnic/cultural identity and socioeconomic position.

The crop fields in the small-scale farming villages are typically sized around 0.5-2 hectares, low-

yielding and rain fed (Kongo and Jewitt 2006, Sturdy et al. 2008, Salomon et al. 2013). Only

family labour is used and farmers have very limited access to mechanised equipment. Some rotate

and/or intercrop maize, beans and pumpkin varieties, and a few use no-till practices while most

17

Figure 4. The case study areas. Pictures 1a) small-scale agricultural village, Upper Thukela region, 1b),

c) large-scale irrigated crop lands next to small-scale farmers’ homesteads and crop land, Upper Thukela

region, 1d) grazing land, Upper Thukela region. 2a), b) large-scale farms, Uppsala County, 2c), d) small-

scale farms, Uppsala County. Photos by 1a) - d) R. Malinga. 2b), c) S. Cousins. 2a), c) Obtained from

Google Earth.

practice conventional tillage using oxen (Kosgei et al. 2007). The communal grazing areas show

clear evidence of land degradation related to soil erosion, gully formations, and overgrazing

(Sonneveld et al. 2005, Kosgei and Jewitt 2006, Salomon et al. 2013). Mainly cattle are grazed in

the communal grazing lands, with little restrictions or coordinated grazing management in place

(Salomon 2011). These kinds of communal villages were evolved under the apartheid era where

people were either forcefully allocated or prevented from moving or expanding due to land

restrictions and racial segregation laws. There are still evident legacies of these discriminating

processes in terms of land access, education levels, and the distribution of wealth, development

opportunities and basic services, despite recent attempts by the government during the past two

decades to amend the historical inequalities (Francis 2006, Thornton 2009, Smith et al. 2014).

The large-scale farmers, distributed in the surroundings of the towns Bergville and Winterton,

privately own several hundreds to thousands hectares of agricultural land, for crop and grazing.

The presence of dams and irrigation systems provide opportunities for expanding the growing

season through double cropping of summer and winter crops (Wesely 2010). The large-scale

farmers’ crop lands are characterised by large fields, and high intensive, mechanised monoculture

18

(Wilk et al. 2011). Most farmers follow similar application programs of artificial fertiliser and

chemical pesticides and practice no-tillage techniques, typically rotating maize and soya, and often

planting winter cover crops for soil improvement and winter grazing (Wilk et al. 2011). The

grazing on the grazing lands is predominantly by cattle. Although large-scale farmers also battle

with erodibility of the sloping grasslands and gully formations, management practices (e.g.

rotation of grazing camps and fencing off gullies) are in place to minimise the land degradation

(Wilk et al. 2011). The commercial farms are important sources of employment for surrounding

communities, both in terms of permanent and seasonal employments. Many farms also have

present and previous farm employees and their families residing within the farm boundaries.

Uppsala County, Sweden

The study area is situated in south-central Sweden in Uppsala County (figure 4:2), an area with

fairly homogeneous climate. Rainfall is higher during the summer months of the year (up to 60

millimetres per day), while less abundant in winter (up to 25 millimetres per day), accumulating

around 530 millimetres per year. The large-scale farms (average 336 hectares) are located in the

intensively managed agricultural area around Uppsala-Enköping-Västerås, and were selected

among the 100 largest farms in that area. The small-scale farms (average 13 hectares) are situated

on the Hållnäs peninsula and were selected among the 50 smallest farms around Hållnäs. The two

farming systems mainly differ in the proportion of crop land (on average 6% within a 5 kilometre

circle around farmhouses in the small-scale system compared to 44% around farmhouses in the

large-scale system) and of forest (78-41% within 5 kilometres from farm houses) surrounding the

farms (often, if not always, in part owned and managed by the same farmers) (paper IV). The

geophysical conditions also differ in the region; the more forested, small-scale farming landscape

in north-east is characterised by poorer, primarily sandy soils, while soils in the large-scale area in

the south-west are dominated by richer clay soils, and with a flatter topography (Lindborg et al.

2008). Cereal production, primarily of wheat and barley, dominates the crop production in both

these agricultural landscapes (Nykvist 2014). The vast majority of crop land and cultivated

pastures in Sweden is rain fed (Eurostat 2012). Irrigation is carried out at a very small scale and

often at trial levels (Rosenqvist et al. 1997).

The agriculture in Sweden has undergone constant changes through history in terms of land use

and political change (Saifi and Drake 2008, Slätmo 2014). The land surface used for agriculture

has decreased after 1950, as well as the number of farms, while the farm sizes have increased

during the same period of time (Saifi and Drake 2008). The two farming systems in paper IV

represent two contrasting outcomes of this gradual change. Around Hållnäs (figure 4:2),

population has decreased over the past decades, and the agricultural land uses have shifted towards

mainly forest, and the traditional family-farming system has become more small-scale hobby

farming in addition to other income sources (Stenseke et al. 2012). There has been a decline in

agricultural land uses as well as population in the area over the past few decades (Stenseke et al.

2012, Slätmo 2014). Simultaneously, the Uppsala-Enköping-Västerås region (figure 4:2) is an

increasingly urbanised area where agricultural management has intensified, and become more

mechanised and specialised. The number of farm owners have declined, managing larger tracts of

land than previously, while crop productivity has increased (Saifi and Drake 2008, Jaramillo et al.

2013)

19

Swedish agriculture is controlled by regulations within the European Union, which through agro-

environmental subsidies schemes aims to diversify the agricultural landscapes. Diversification of

the landscape is implemented by managing for biodiversity, conservation of cultural-historical

land uses and artefacts, and reducing negative outcomes of the agricultural activities through for

instance reduction of nutrient run-off, while increasing the profitability for European farmers.

Agriculture in Sweden has experienced difficulties to compete on the globalised and increasingly

specialised food market, related to issues such as expensive labour, strict environmental and

animal husbandry laws, as well as climatic conditions which only allows short growing seasons

(Björklund et al. 1999, Slätmo 2014). Thus, viability remains a challenge in the agricultural sector

in Sweden (Saifi and Drake 2008).

Methods

This thesis uses a multi-method approach, with a strong focus on field work and participatory

methods, combined to capture several aspects of the social-ecological components comprising the

agricultural landscapes. Throughout the thesis, I use both biophysical and social, primary and

secondary data, stakeholder involvement, from local to regional level, expert assessments and

global meta-data (see table 1 for overview).

Tools for spatially explicit analyses of ecosystem services play an important role in land use

planning and environmental policy (Burkhard et al. 2013, Reyers et al. 2013). Spatial scale is

highly relevant to consider when assessing ecosystem services, as the distribution of ecosystem

services is spatially dependent, vary among services, and the spatial units from which ecosystem

services are generated differ (Bennett et al. 2009, Andersson et al. 2015, Raudsepp-Hearne and

Peterson 2016). In Paper I I carried out a literature review, where I used a standardised literature

search on ISI-Web of Knowledge to identify papers on ecosystem service mapping, using the terms

“map” or “spatial distribution” or “spatial pattern” and “ecosystem services” or “ecosystem goods

and services” or “ecological services”. Based upon this search, I selected only studies that (i) were

performed within an ecosystem service framework, (ii) had a connection to a case study, (iii)

included more than one services, (iv) were conducted in terrestrial systems, and (v) presented

spatially explicit quantification of ecosystem services at a smaller scale than global. A total of 39

papers, which presented 47 different case studies, were then analysed in terms of what ecosystem

services were mapped in the studies, where in the world they were based and at what spatial scale

(size of the study area (spatial extent) and grain size (resolution)). Paper II used a similar method

to compile a list of ecosystem services typically assessed in Southern African agricultural land

uses (see paper II for details on search terms and selection criteria).

Papers II, III and IV included the viewpoints from a wide range of stakeholders with various sets

of knowledge, ranging from stakeholders with local, regional and global knowledge, i.e.

indigenous, practitioners’ and scientific experts’ knowledge. Foremost, I included local farmers,

who are the stakeholders with the most intimate knowledge and understanding of the lands they

manage. I used three ways of including stakeholders in this theses: 1) through in-depth interviews

with farmers and other informants (papers II, III and IV); 2) by eliciting expert opinion to

prioritise among ecosystem services (paper II) and to evaluate spatial services generation (paper

20

III) and 3) by exploring interactive participatory methods (scenario planning in paper II and

mapping exercises in paper III) (table 1).

In paper II I applied an iterative participatory scenario planning approach (modified from Evans

et al. 2006 and Enfors et al. 2008), with a broad range of stakeholders, to understand multiple

perspectives of the past, present and future in the Upper Thukela region. The foci of the scenarios

were the three largest user groups in the area, namely large-scale and small-scale farmers, and

representatives from nature reserves. A series of interviews, workshops, focus group discussions

and exercises resulted in three explorative and contrasting storylines (Equal environment,

Diverging climate and Adaptive collaboration, see Appendix 3 in paper II), presenting internally

consistent alternative futures in the year 2030, including both challenges and opportunities for all

user groups. The storylines were analysed to estimate the potential change of ecosystem services

by translating general social and ecological variations into the changeability of services (table 1 in

paper II). This analysis generated a list of ranked services that were most prone to change across

all three scenarios. Further, three lists of prioritised and ranked ecosystem services for the area

were composed using experts and through a literature search. The four lists of identified and

prioritised ecosystem services were compared in terms of similarity of identity, placement and

number of services in the lists. The lists were also compared in terms of ecosystem service

categories (provisioning, regulating and cultural) using the top-ten ranked services in all lists.

Participatory mapping is a technique used to obtain high resolution land use data, direct discussions

with the land users about management practices and where in the landscapes material and non-

material values are valued (Ryan 2011, Plieninger et al. 2013b, Sinare et al. 2016). In paper III, I

carried out a participatory mapping exercise with the local farmers in the Upper Thukela region,

South Africa, to capture the farmers’ understanding and perspectives on the supply and demand of

ecosystem services. Open-ended interviews were conducted in combination with mapping

exercises where the farmers used aerial photographs of their land holdings to mark out boundaries,

land uses and land cover, management practices and places where 12 different ecosystem services

were perceived to be produced, used, collected and appreciated. The farmers were also asked

questions about farming methods, farm inheritance, farming skills and knowledge heritage, and

their perspectives of the farmers’ role and responsibility in society. The spatial information was

synthesised and processed into Graphic Information Systems (GIS) layers using QuantumGIS.

Polygons were drawn for each farmer and each land use, crop lands and grazing lands, which were

used for calculations of e.g. areas, slope and identification of soil types from available GIS layers.

Based on published and unpublished data on soil characteristics from the study area, and

information on management practices as indicated by the farmers, an expert based assessment was

conducted in order to estimate the supply of an additional four ecosystem services. Information

about the demand for the ecosystem services was extracted from in-depth interviews. The term

‘supply’ in paper III meant the production/use/appreciation of a service, and the term ‘demand’

was referred to as the farmers’ own demand for the same service, in order to identify gaps between

supply and demand. The supply-demand relation was also analysed in terms of the capacity of the

farmer groups to maintain the supply and meet their demand based on a combination of the

condition of the land, socioeconomic and cultural factors (see paper III for detailed description

of the analytical approach).

21

In paper IV I further deepened the understanding of the complexity of ecosystem service supply

and demand by testing another explorative approach in a second case study area, Uppsala County,

Sweden. This case study also included small-scale and large-scale agriculture, although with less

apparent differences in farm-size, farming intensity and socioeconomic prerequisites between the

two farmer groups. Paper IV combined already existing, spatially explicit, published data on

farmers’ values and perspectives (Nykvist 2014), and bird and plant surveys (Andersson and

Lindborg 2014) that were collected within the same scientific program (Ekoklim). The supply and

demand of 11 ecosystem services in two Swedish farming systems (high intensity and low

intensity), were analysed at a near-house and landscape scale. Publically available data such as

land use and statistical census information were also used. In total, 11 biophysical and 11 social

indicators were identified to describe different dimensions of supply and demand of services. Here,

‘supply’ was expressed as the quantity of a service, and ‘demand’ as the value placed on the

services by the farmers (see paper IV for detailed description of the analytical approach).

Table 1. Overview of methods, approaches and stakeholder groups used throughout the papers.

Liter

ature

revie

w

Loca

l

stak

ehold

ers

Reg

ional

stak

ehold

ers

Exper

t

opin

ion

In-d

epth

inte

rvie

w

Par

tici

pat

ory

met

hod

Pri

mar

y

dat

a

Sec

ondar

y

dat

a

Met

a-dat

a

Soci

al

dat

a

Bio

physi

cal

dat

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Paper I

Paper II

Paper III

Paper IV

22

Results and discussion

Box 2. Synthesis of the results

The main results from this thesis are summarised here, and presented in more detail and discussed in

the subsequent section.

The majority of mapped ecosystem services in current literature were regulating services

(47%). Services were mostly mapped at intermediate scales (municipality and provincial

level) and 66% of the studies used a fine resolution of 1 hectare or less (paper I).

Scenario planning added limited value for identifying relevant ecosystem services to assess

in a changing agricultural landscape, but improved knowledge of the case study area,

strengthened relationships with stakeholders, and triggered useful discussions with

stakeholders on expectations and uncertainties of the future (paper II).

When stakeholders were involved in the process of selecting ecosystem services, more

attention was given to cultural services, especially other cultural services than recreation and

tourism (papers I and II).

There were clear differences between South African small-scale and large-scale agriculture

in terms of both the supply of and the demand for ecosystem services, as well as the capacity

of the farmer groups to maintain the supply of and meet their demand for the services

(paper III).

There was a dominating shortfall of ecosystem service supply in relation to the demand for

these services among small-scale farmers in South Africa, while large-scale farmers

generally met their demand (paper III).

The supply and demand of ecosystem services in a comparison between small-scale and

large-scale agriculture in Sweden differed between the farmer groups and showed

complexity in the ways services were interpreted and perceived in different systems (paper

IV).

The choice of indicators significantly altered the outcomes of ecosystem service

quantification, and a multiple indicator approach improved the understanding of the

dynamics of ecosystem service supply and demand in Swedish agricultural landscapes

(paper IV).

A cross-case comparison showed that large-scale agriculture in Sweden and South Africa

presented similar ecosystem service bundles, while small-scale agricultural systems differed

in terms of ecosystem service generation (papers III and IV).

23

Comparing different agricultural landscapes

There is an increasing pressure on agricultural landscapes to be multifunctional, in order to meet

the demands for multiple ecosystem services from diverse stakeholders and interests (Rabbinge

and Bindraban 2012). Multifunctional landscapes, however, often experience trade-offs that occur

due to conflicting interests between beneficiaries, preferences and policies (Power 2010, Bennett

et al. 2009, Smith et al. 2012, King et al. 2015). This illustrates the need for spatial tools that

analyse the supply and demand of ecosystem services, to guide land use policy and decision

making that can help balance these different goals. Papers III and IV, also emphasised by

Andersson et al. (2015), stressed that that the supply and demand of ecosystem services are highly

context-dependent, and more field data of the social and ecological dimensions of ecosystem

services at relevant scales are required to fully understand these dynamics.

In paper III I found that the supply of services in the small-scale farming areas were distributed

more evenly between the two land uses (crop land and grazing land), than in the large-scale areas

(figure 2 in paper III). Non-cultivated provisioning services (e.g. collection of wild foods, fire

wood and building material) and some cultural services (e.g. cultural heritage, spiritual value and

social relations) had higher importance for small-scale farmers. Recreation was appreciated only

by the large-scale farmers, predominantly in the grazing lands, while social relations (meetings)

and the collection of traditional medicines were carried out only by small-scale farmers. These

results showed similar pattern to a study comparing collection of wild foods and traditional

medicines in Russia, Ukraine and Sweden (Stryamets et al. 2015). They found that the dependence

on these services were much higher among the respondents in the least developed rural areas of

Russia and Ukraine than in Sweden, where the respondents, similar to the large-scale farmers in

South Africa, occasionally collected these species (but a significantly smaller variety) for

recreational purposes. Stryamets et al. (2015), like paper III, showed that economic development

influences the consumption of wild foods and medicine, and shifts those activities from survival

and livelihoods to recreation. The same service may thus result in different kinds of benefits to

different users, depending on the sociocultural-economic context (Daw et al. 2011). There were

also clear differences between the two farmer groups in terms of supply, demand and the capacity

of the farmers to influence ecosystem service generation within their landscapes (figure 5, paper

III). The large-scale farmers generally produced food to meet their own demands (i.e. demands

for the service food production as an income-generating benefit) (figure 5b), and had management

practices in place to mitigate land degradation and erosion. The food production at the commercial

farms thus cater to the demand of other beneficiaries elsewhere, while also providing opportunities

for employment for others. On the contrary, small-scale farmers lacked the capacity to maintain

the supply and meet their own demands (i.e. demands for the service food production as a benefit

related to food security and nutrition) (figure 5a). These results showed that the significant shortage

in agricultural production contributes significantly to poverty among the small-scale farmers,

results in diversification of land uses and increases the dependence on common-resource

ecosystem services. The high demand for these services contributes to land degradation which

further aggravates poverty and vulnerability. Both landscape types have the potential to become

more multifunctional, while a multitude of external and internal factors pose challenges to both

farmer groups to develop strong-founded multifunctionality and sustainable agriculture. Paper III

24

Figure 5. Comparison between a) small-scale and b) large-scale agricultural landscapes (crop land and

grazing land combined) in terms of the supply of 16 ecosystem services (low, medium high, x-axis), the

demand thereof (low, medium high, y-axis) and the capacity of the farmer groups to maintain the supply

and meet the demand (colour of the box: low=dark red, medium=pink and high=light pink) (from paper

III).

further discusses the various factors that hamper multifunctionality within the two kinds of

landscapes.

Paper IV identified multiple, biophysical and social, indicators to quantify the ecosystem services.

All services, except water availability, could be described by multiple indicators. Some indicators

could address multiple ecosystem services, e.g. open landscape, which described pollination,

biodiversity, nutrient retention and aesthetic experience. Additionally, some indicators could refer

to both supply and demand of a certain service, such as cultural heritage elements. This approach

highlighted the complexity in the relationship between supply and demand of services, and

showed, in congruence with a study by Martín-López et al. (2014) that the outcomes of an

ecosystem service assessment is likely to differ with the chosen indicators (table 2 in paper IV).

Martín-Lopéz et al (2014) found that biophysical, social and monetary indicators for the same

services gave different results, and highlighted the need to develop methods to systematically

combine different kinds of indicators.

The supply of and demand for many ecosystem services differed between the farmer groups also

in Sweden, especially on the demand dimension (figure 2 in paper IV). Examples are crop

production which is, not surprisingly, higher in the large-scale areas while timber production is

higher in the more forested small-scale areas. Like paper III, paper IV also found mismatches

between the supply and demand of services when comparing small-scale and large-scale farmers,

although not showing as clear patters as paper III. This mismatch was most clearly shown in the

services recreation, biodiversity, aesthetic experience, farmer identity and cultural heritage. For

25

example, there was no significant differences in biodiversity (in terms of species richness and

number of red-listed species) between the small-scale and large-scale systems, which is a result

that goes against literature suggesting that production-oriented agriculture holds less biodiversity

(Stoate et al. 2009, Tcharntke et al. 2012). At the same time, biodiversity was valued higher among

small-scale farmers. Rather than of value, legislation to protect biodiversity was considered to

limit management options by large-scale farmers. The aesthetic values connected to the indicator

‘open landscape’ were expressed to a larger degree by small-scale farmers in the more forested

areas, than by the large-scale farmers, who live in a more open landscape, which is congruent with

other studies on farmer perception (Stenseke 2009). This shows that ecosystem services can be

perceived in various ways and the appreciation of a service can be contextualised differently

between different groups (Daw et al. 2011).

Cross-case comparison of ecosystem service supply

In order to compare patterns of ecosystem service supply in small-scale and large-scale agriculture

between the two study areas (Upper Thukela region, South Africa, paper III, and Uppsala County,

Sweden, paper IV) I used flower diagrams to visualise the supply of six ecosystem services (crop

production, recreation, cultural heritage, aesthetic values, nutrient retention and water availability)

that had been assessed in both study areas (figure 6). The ecosystem service flowers representing

the Swedish and the South African large-scale farming systems were highly similar, with overall

high levels of all services except cultural heritage, which is a pattern that may be typical for many

large-scale agricultural systems across the globe (Daugstad et al. 2006). In contrast, the similarities

between the small-scale farmers were not as strong. They shared relatively low levels of crop

production and nutrient retention, but other than that they differed. Water availability was high in

the Swedish system, based on rainfall and the general hydroclimate, and in the South African large-

scale agricultural lands, where the farmers have access to irrigation. Although the rainfall in the

South African site is fairly similar between small-scale and large-scale areas, the condition of the

small-scale farmers’ lands, erosion, farming methods, and absence of irrigation technology means

that the water availability for small-holder farmers was low. Irrespective of agricultural systems,

the farmers attributed high values to the aesthetics of their lands. This probably reflects the general

expression from the vast majority of the farmers in the interviews that farming is a passion, a

choice of life and that the landscapes shaped by the farming culture is in accordance with the

farmers’ preferences. Recreation, an ecosystem service that is often associated with agricultural

landscapes (Swinton et al. 2007, Pinto-Correia et al. 2013), was also shown to be highly connected

to lifestyle and culture. Recreational activities were widely carried out among the large-scale

farmers in South Africa, and in both Swedish farming systems. Recreation opportunities were high

in these systems, and expressed as important, especially among the Swedish small-scale farmers.

Small-scale farmers in South Africa however expressed a lack of interest in recreational activities

as those are not part of their way of life. The general similarity between the large-scale bundles

and the dissimilarity between the small-scale bundles indicates that as the farm size and intensity

increase, the variability of ecosystem service bundles decreases. This can be because factors such

as climate and biophysical preconditions become less critical for intensive agriculture, at least in

the shorter term, due to increased inputs, e.g. artificial nutrients, chemical pest control and large-

scale irrigation, that are aimed at ‘mimicking’ the ecological processes on which farming relies

(Rist et al. 2014). On the other end of the intensity continuum (Rist et al. 2014), small-scale

26

Figure 6. The supply of six ecosystem services in contrasting agricultural landscapes from two different

case study areas. 1a) South African small-scale agriculture (average farm size 2 ha), 1b) South-African

large-scale agriculture (average farm size 1600 ha), 2a) Swedish small-scale agriculture (average farm

size 13 ha), 2b) South African large-scale agriculture (average farm size 336 ha). The supply of each service

was normalised for the study areas separately, where each of the six flower petals represented one

ecosystem service. The length of the axes across the flower petals represent the maximum value, and were

calculated differently for each study area (see Appendix 1 for a more detailed description of data handling

and analysis).

systems with less anthropogenic inputs, are shaped more by a diversity of sociocultural-economic

and biophysical-climatic factors. The small-scale systems are thus likely to have more distinct

context-dependent sets of drivers and types of values influencing the ecosystem service generation.

The small-scale systems in this comparison are largely shaped by the lifestyle choices of the

farmers in Sweden, and by the poverty of farmers in South Africa.

Mapping and assessing ecosystem services

The concept of ecosystem services has gained increasing attention from science and policy in the

last decades leading to remarkable development of methods to assess and spatially map ecosystem

services (Seppelt et al. 2011, Burkhard et al. 2013). However, knowledge gaps and methodological

challenges persist, which hamper the implementation of the ecosystem service concept into

practice. In the following sections I address some of these gaps and challenges and relate them to

the findings of the four papers: the aspect of spatial scale in ecosystem service mapping, methods

for selecting and prioritizing among ecosystem services, and lastly stakeholder participation in

ecosystem service assessments.

27

Mapping ecosystem services at relevant scales

The literature review in paper I was based on 47 studies from 39 papers, which mapped in total

300 ecosystem service entries. The analysis found that the 47 mapping studies were fairly well

distributed across the world, and took place at six different continents and in 22 different countries

(figure 1 in paper I). As highlighted also by other authors (Lavorel et al. 2011, Egoh et al. 2012,

Martínez-Harms and Balvanera 2012), paper I showed that local scale ecosystem service mapping

were scarce. Most common, in 35 of the 47 studies, was mapping at intermediate scales

(municipality or provincial), and only two studies mapped ecosystem services at local scale

(village/farm) (figure 3 in paper I). The fact that most studies on multiple ecosystem service

generation are performed at larger scales has been raised as a concern with regards to land use

policy being informed by predominantly large-scale assessments (Fischer et al. 2008). However,

while studies at a local scale were most lacking, most of the mapping studies in the review (66%)

used the grain size of 1 hectare or smaller, meaning that these studies can potentially still provide

meaningful insights into land use planning. On the other hand, ecosystem services are most

commonly quantified and mapped using land use proxies, which can lead to errors when it does

not account for spatial variability in different landscape variables (e.g. soils, slope, vegetation)

(Eigenbrod et al. 2010). Further, as much as 17% of the studies in the literature review lacked

information on the resolution. In order to capture the fine-scale spatial dynamics to adequately

inform local management decisions and landscape planning for multiple ecosystem services,

methods for fine-scale mapping, such as presented by papers III and IV, need to be developed.

Selecting ecosystem services

While the process of selecting services for an ecosystem service assessment is highly important

(Seppelt et al. 2011), there is no standardised way of doing this. Ecosystem service studies list

various criteria for selecting services, such as literature reviews (Anderson et al. 2009), data

availability (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010, Queiroz et al. 2015), case-specific needs, issues, and

trends (Fisher et al. 2011), local and national policy goals (Wendland et al. 2010, Fisher et al.

2011), representation of ecosystem service categories (Posthumus et al. 2010, Raudsepp-Hearne

et al. 2010, Queiroz et al. 2015), and integrated knowledge of stakeholders (Reyers et al. 2009,

O'Farrell et al. 2010, Willaarts et al. 2012). The selection approach and criteria that influence the

service selection will thus affect the outcome and application of the assessment. Paper II tested

different ways of selecting ecosystem services for an assessment and showed that using

participatory scenario planning gave very similar lists of prioritised services as consulting experts

with experience in working in the study area. Paper II also reviewed literature as a method to

select services, and this resulted in a list of services that was noticeably different from the other

methods using experts and stakeholder participation to select services, especially in terms of fewer

cultural services (figure 5 in paper II). This result was echoed by unpublished data from paper I,

which further showed that in 10 out of 39 papers, stakeholders were involved in the process of

selecting ecosystem services, and in these papers, a more diverse set of cultural services were

prioritised. Recreation and tourism, cultural heritage, aesthetic value and nature inspiration had

almost equal priority in these 10 studies as opposed to the rest of the papers, which had 72% of

the cultural services covering only recreation and tourism.

28

Ecosystem service categories

Paper I and other literature reviews (Egoh et al 2012, Martínez-Harms and Balvanera 2012) found

that regulating ecosystem services were the services most commonly mapped compared to other

categories. Several ecosystem service authors highlight the importance of including cultural

ecosystem services in ecosystem service assessments (Daniel et al. 2012, van Berkel and Verburg

2014, Plieninger et al. 2015), and some stress that cultural ecosystem services are overlooked

(Schaich et al. 2010, Plieninger et al. 2013b). Paper I showed that 47% of the 300 mapped

ecosystem service entries were regulating services, 24% provisioning, 19% cultural and 10%

supporting. Unpublished data from the literature review in paper I, showed that a majority of the

papers (69%) included at least one cultural service. Although cultural services were not

underrepresented compared to provisioning and supporting services, there was a clear bias towards

tourism and recreation within the mapped cultural services (figure 4 in paper I). Also, only 9 of

the 39 papers included two or more cultural services. This probably reflects the shortage of

applicable methods to quantify many of the cultural services that are of obvious importance for

human well-being (Seppelt et al. 2011, Plieninger et al. 2013b). Lack of available spatially explicit

data may be one of the major reasons for not including a wider range of cultural services, given

that many of the mapping studies mention availability of data as a requirement when selecting

services to map (e.g. Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010, Rogers et al. 2010, Queiroz et al. 2015). Ways

of including a more balanced set of ecosystem services, accounting also for the less tangible and

possibly irreplaceable values, are hence needed. Even though cultural ecosystem services are

increasingly included in ecosystem service research, the incorporation of cultural ecosystem

services into policy and practice, both at local, regional and national levels, is less developed

(Axelsson et al. 2013, Sitas et al. 2014).

Stakeholder participation

These results illustrate the importance of involving stakeholders in the process of selecting and

prioritizing among services, which can lead to a more diverse set of services (paper II) and

broaden the choices of cultural services (paper I). The ecosystem service concept has been proven

challenging to implement into practice (Sitas et al. 2014). Land use policy and landscape planning

targeting ecosystem services that have been prioritised through participatory methods with a wide

range of beneficiaries can thus potentially be received better by the broader public (Seppelt et al.

2011). The integration of various stakeholders’ knowledge and participatory methods in this thesis

were aimed at both widening and specializing the understanding of the people, ecosystems and

ecosystem services in the study areas. Participatory mapping was useful in order to engage with

the farmers to obtain local knowledge associated with the farmers’ land holdings, management

practices, crop varieties, and local species and ecosystems (Plieninger et al. 2013b, Sinare et al.

2016, paper III). The regional stakeholders, such as practitioners and officials from local

organizations, shared their perspectives of recent history, state and trends in the area, having a

broad knowledge of local and regional policy and the implementation thereof. Scientific experts

from across the world, both with or without direct experience from the study area, helped to place

the local and regional knowledge into a scientific context, anchored both to the local circumstances

and to global scientific relevance (papers II and III). Although being a resource demanding

method, participatory scenario planning (paper II) proved to be particularly useful for the project

by enabling dynamic discussions with both local and regional stakeholders of the area, and

improving the understanding of the diversity of perspectives by the people who face future

29

challenges and opportunities in a changing world (Peterson 2007, Enfors et al. 2008). The process

helped establishing trust and contacts with the local stakeholders and provided a platform for

sharing ideas and expectations, which is crucial when carrying out research with stakeholders, here

farmers, and at farmer’s lands (Nicholas and Hinckley 2011). The result from paper II further

inspired the planning of the subsequent participatory mapping exercise and assisted in prioritizing

among ecosystem services (paper III). The use of participatory methods in this thesis increased

the understanding of values and perspectives of ecosystem services, which biophysical data would

not have captured, especially regarding the demand dimension of ecosystem services which is

connected to people’s personal perceptions and reflections (Costanza et al. 2007, Hernández-

Morcillo et al. 2013, papers III and IV). Papers III and IV further revealed important dynamics

of the social-ecological nature of ecosystem services, and showed the diversity of ways in which

ecosystem services can be produced, used, valued and perceived, even within a relatively narrow

selection of beneficiaries.

Reflections on the empirical approach and ways forward

In this thesis I used multiple methods from different disciplines and I also developed new

integrated analytic approaches. I combined local and scientific knowledge through stakeholder

participation and expert assessment. The development and implementation of transdisciplinary

approaches, both within research and policy, however come with challenges (Lang et al. 2012,

Angelstam et al. 2013, Brandt et al. 2013). Amongst these challenges are: integrating methods

from different disciplines (Bryman 2006), and integrating different knowledge systems (Chalmers

and Fabricius 2007, Tengö et al. 2014). Here follows a reflection on the approaches used in this

thesis, and how the methods can be advanced to address new research questions that have emerged

from this thesis.

During the scenario planning approach (paper II) the aim was to integrate the perceptions of the

local stakeholders with regional stakeholders and scientific experts, to develop scenarios on future

regional development. This proved to be challenging as some of the viewpoints were conflicting,

both between and within groups of stakeholders. Through iteration and by validating the

plausibility and relevance of the storylines with all stakeholder groups, I was positive that the

perceptions of the stakeholder groups were sufficiently balanced. Future studies integrating

knowledge from a wide range of stakeholders and knowledge systems could benefit from a

thorough analysis of the analogous and conflicting perceptions and opinions that arise. This could

help emphasizing where and how the knowledge systems can add value to one another (Martín-

López et al. 2014, Tengö et al. 2014, Gaspare et al. 2015).

Papers III and IV combined biophysical and social data to quantify the supply and demand of

ecosystem services. The papers gained knowledge through in-depth interviews with farmers

related to their values and perceptions of services as well as management practices and strategies

to deal with various constraints. While the interviews contributed significantly to the

understanding of ecosystem services, in particular related to the demand of services, a potential

development of this approach could be a more systematic socio-cultural value survey among a

larger number of stakeholders (Martín-López et al. 2014), and ranking exercises (López-Marrero

30

and Hermansen-Báez 2011). This could increase the understanding on the perceived relative

importance of ecosystem services within different stakeholder groups.

The cross-case comparison between the case studies in South Africa (paper III) and Sweden

(paper IV) revealed intriguing patterns suggesting that ecosystem service bundles generated in

large-scale agricultural systems are more similar than the bundles generated in small-scale systems

(figure 6). However, there are limitations to what conclusions can be drawn from these relatively

small data sets, and because different methods were used to quantify the services in the two studies.

One way to improve possibilities for cross-comparison is to develop a more robust spatial analysis

approach, with solid and well-described datasets including both social and biophysical, site-

specific data at relevant scales. Some questions that arise from figure 6 are: How would the

ecosystem services bundles appear if other/more services were included? How would the bundles

be shaped if other/more indicators were used? To address these questions, a more thorough

multiple-indicator approach is needed, including a wider range of ecosystem services. Paper IV

emphasised that the choice of indicators can have significant effect on the results, which could be

explored further by depicting ‘sub-petals’ for each indicator. Another question relevant to explore

further is: What are the social-ecological factors behind the shapes of the bundles? In this thesis I

discuss that the similar bundles between the large-scale farmers in Sweden and South Africa can

be related to specialised and mechanised agriculture where anthropogenic inputs reduce the

importance of the natural biophysical conditions, and that the small-scale farms are likely to have

a wider range of context-dependent drivers leading to more variable ecosystem service bundles.

However, by adopting an approach similar to Meacham et al. (2016), the social-ecological drivers

behind ecosystem service bundling can be further analysed and understood. Moreover, the analysis

could be strengthened by including a spectra of farm sizes and farming intensities, such as

presented by Rist et al (2014), ranging from natural to anthropogenic inputs to production systems.

While papers III and IV provide important contributions to further understanding of the complex

relationships between the supply of and demand for ecosystem services, the flower diagrams in

figure 6 however only include the supply aspect. In order to identify insufficient supply in relation

to demand, a future analysis building on the results from this thesis could thus further be layered

with the demand for the services. This could help guiding management towards reducing these

gaps and increasing multifunctionality.

On a personal note

How can the gaps we see between the supply of and the demand for ecosystem services in areas

like the small-scale farming villages in the Drakensberg be reduced? How can Alan Paton’s feared

degradation of grasslands unable to keep and guard humanity, as described in the introduction of

this thesis, be avoided? What is needed to make the high producing agriculture in the world

productive also in the long-term? My hope is that this thesis will inspire others to further explore

the diverse field of ecosystem services and the stimulating topic of agricultural landscapes. There

is so much more to learn about farming and farmers! Only by joint efforts we can gain the

knowledge we need to improve the sustainability of agricultural landscapes and secure a long-term

provision of the multiple ecosystem services on which we depend.

31

Conclusions

In this thesis I use and develop local scale, transdisciplinary and participatory methods that will

deepen the understanding of how multiple ecosystem services in different agricultural landscapes

are generated. The results indicate that all agricultural systems present multifunctionality to a

varying degree. The large-scale systems display similar ecosystem service bundles, while the

small-scale systems differ. This diversity is driven by the substantially different social-economic

contexts of these systems. The small-scale system with high levels of poverty underperforms in

terms of many ecosystem services compared to all the other systems. This illustrates that we need

to tackle poverty in order to ensure better performing landscapes.

The thesis also provides new insights into the complex relationships between supply and demand,

and highlights the need to understand both the biophysical and social dimensions of ecosystem

services to sustainably manage agricultural landscapes for multifunctionality. For example, the

results show clear differences between South African small-scale and large-scale agriculture in

terms of the capacity to maintain the supply and meet their demand, for almost all services (from

provisioning to regulating and cultural). The small-scale farmers struggle to meet their demand for

services while large-scale farmers generally produce from their lands in accordance with their

demands.

The thesis looks at the role that stakeholder inclusion has in understanding ecosystem services. It

shows that a diverse set of beneficiaries and users, is likely to diversify the prioritised ecosystem

services included in an assessment, as well as to capture broader perspectives of how the services

are analysed. For example, when stakeholders were involved in the process of selecting ecosystem

services, more attention was given to cultural services, especially other cultural services than

recreation and tourism. The thesis also illustrates that participatory approaches such as scenario

planning and mapping exercises can facilitate bringing some of these perspectives into scientific

knowledge.

The thesis also reflects on the transdisciplinary methods needed to perform ecosystem services

analyses and it shows that multiple indicators are needed to increase the understanding of the

social-ecological nature of ecosystem services. The results highlight that the choice of indicators

can significantly alter the outcomes of ecosystem service quantification illustrating that indicators

must be carefully selected. There is a need to combine qualitative and quantitative data at different

scales (such as farm- and landscape-level) to better understand the fine-scale dynamics of

ecosystem services bundles. This will lead to better management of multiple interacting ecosystem

services and planning for increased multifunctionality.

32

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Sammanfattning

Mänskligheten står inför utmaningen att på ett hållbart sätt producera mat till en växande

befolkning utan att ytterligare skada världens ekosystem. Förändringen av livsmiljöer och

ekosystem till jordbruksmark har möjliggjort civilisationens utveckling, men har också lett till

markförstörelse och förlorad biologisk mångfald, vilket i sin tur idag hotar grunden till de många

ekosystemtjänster vi männniskor är beroende av. Ekosystemtjänster är det som gynnar samhället

genom vårt förvaltande, användande och uppskattande av ekosystemen. Ekosystemtjänsterna

bidrar till och förbättrar vårt välbefinnande och våra livsvillkor på olika sätt, till exempel genom

livsmedel, dricksvatten och material till hus, möbler och kläder, eller genom vatten- och luftrening,

näringstillförsel och pollinering, samt möjligheter till rekreation, naturupplevelser, hälsa och

inspiration.

För att kunna förvalta våra jordbrukslandskap mot en förbättrad och mer hållbar markanvändning,

där ekosystemtjänster står i fokus, behövs en bättre förståelse för hur olika ekosystemtjänster

relaterar till varandra, hur de kan samspela eller motverka varandra under olika typer av förvaltning

och skötsel av ett landskap. Ett exempel är när delar av odlingsmarken avsätts till naturmark, vilket

kan bidra till ökad biologisk mångfald, begränsat näringsläckage samt nya livsmiljöer för arter

som behövs vid pollinering och naturlig skadedjurbekämpning, medan det medför begränsad yta

för odling. Vi behöver också mer kunskap om på vilka rumsliga skalor olika tjänster tillhandahålls,

används och interagerar. För detta krävs att tvärvetenskapliga metoder och verktyg utvecklas

vidare, för att kunna reda ut de komplexa förhållandena mellan tillgång och efterfrågan av olika

ekosystemtjänster. En viktig komponent i arbetet med hållbar utveckling är att bättre integrera

kunskapen som besitts av olika slags aktörer utanför den akademiska världen. Det är därför

betydelsefullt att använda sig av deltagandemetoder i den här typen av forskning.

Den här avhandlingen utforskar jordbrukslandskap som komplexa social-ekologiska system, det

vill säga system där sociala och ekologiska drivkrafter samspelar och påverkar varandra och därför

inte kan hanteras som antingen sociala eller ekologiska system. För att studera uppkomsten av

ekosystemtjänster från olika typer av jordbrukslandskap och undersöka dessa tjänsters social-

ekologiska dynamik används i avhandlingen flera olika metoder. Mer specifikt diskuterar

avhandlingen betydelsen av rumslig skala i studier av ekosystemtjänster, utforskar landskaps-

förändringar, integrerar den akademiska kunskapen med kunskap från andra aktörer i samhället,

samt utvecklar verktyg för att bättre förstå de dynamiska förhållandena mellan tillgång och

efterfrågan av flera samspelande ekosystemtjänster.

Artikel I presenterar en systematisk översikt av studier där ekosystemtjänster kvanitfierats och hur

dessa studier förhåller sig till rumslig skala. Artikeln fann att tjänster vanligtvis kvantifierades på

intermediära skalor (på kommun- och provinsnivå), och sällan på lokal skala (gårds-/bynivå). Det

behövs därför mer platsspecifik kvantifiering av ekosystemtjänster på lokal skala för att förstå

39

finskaliga dynamiker hos ekosystemtjänster, vilket är nödvändigt för en hållbar landskaps-

förvaltning.

För att utforska framtidens möjligheter och utmaningar i ett jordbruksdominerat område i Övre

Thukela-regionen i Sydafrika, utvecklade artikel II alternativa framtidsscenarier. Detta gjordes

genom en deltagandeprocess för scenarieutveckling, där jordbrukare, representanter från lokala

organisationer och myndigheter, samt forskare deltog. Ett av syftena med studien var att jämföra

olika metoder för att välja ut och prioritera mellan relevanta ekosystemtjänster för fördjupade

analyser. Det visade sig att processen där scenarier utvecklades gav ett liknande urval av tjänster

som den metod som tillfrågade en grupp experter verksamma inom studieområdet. Samtidigt

bidrog scenarieprocessen till att skapa kontakter och ett ömsesidigt förtroende mellan

forskargruppen och de olika aktörerna, samt tillförde ovärderlig kunskap om studieområdets

social-ekologiska dynamik.

Artikel I och II visar att deltagandetekniker kan medföra prioritering av ett bredare urval av

ekosystemtjänster och att fler icke-materiella ekosystemtjänster, så som kulturarv och spirituella

värden, ges större betydelse. Detta kan bidra till en landskapsförvaltning som tar hänsyn till en

större mångfald av aktörer.

Artikel III och IV kombinerade information om de sociala och ekologiska aspekterna av

ekosystemtjänster för att studera tillgång och efterfrågan av tjänster på gårds- och landskapsnivå.

Artikel III använde sig av djupintervjuer, deltagande kvantifieringstekniker samt expertutlåtande

i Övre Thukela-regionen i Sydafrika. I artikel IV användes djupintervjuer och tidigare publicerade

biofysiska/ekologiska undersökningar i Uppsala Län i Sverige. I båda studieområderna jämfördes

småskaliga och storskaliga jordbruksområden, där stor vikt lades vid jordbrukarnas kunskaper,

erfarenheter och perspektiv. Båda studierna visar tydliga skillnader mellan de småskaliga och

storskaliga jordbruken, både gällande tillgång och efterfrågan av ekosystem-tjänster. Artikel III

visar även att den förmåga jordbrukarna har att påverka uppkomsten av tjänster i sina

jordbrukslandskap skiljer sig avsevärt. De storskaliga bönderna förvaltar sina jordbruks-landskap

på sådant sätt att det svarar mot deras efterfrågan av tjänster. Däremot är jordbruksproduktionen

så pass låg, och fattigdomen så pass utbredd, bland de småskaliga bönderna, att deras efterfrågan

av ekosystemtjänster kraftig överstiger det utbud av tjänster som tillhandahålls inom deras

områden. Artikel IV befäster vidare vikten av att använda flera indikatorer och kombinera social

och biofysisk/ekologisk information för att kvantifiera och undersöka ekosystemtjänsternas

komplexa och social-ekologiska natur.

Genom att använda resultaten från artikel III och IV, möjliggjordes en jämförelse också mellan de

två studieområdena, med avseende på de sammankopplade ”knippen” av ekosystemtjänster som

tillhandahålls inom de småskaliga och storskaliga jordbruksområdena i Sydafrika och Sverige.

Analysen visar att de ekosystemtjänstknippen som generas i de storskaliga jordbrukssystemen är

relativt lika. De båda storskaliga systemen visar på höga nivåer av bland annat produktion av

grödor, kontroll mot näringsläckage, vattentillgång och rekreationsmöjligheter men lägre kultur-

historiska värden. De båda småskaliga jordbruken har betydligt lägre produktion av grödor, högre

kulturhistoriska värden, men i övrigt genererade de olika ekosystemtjänstknippen. Dessa

skillnader och likheter mellan och inom studieområderna beror på den mängd olika sociala och

ekologiska drivkrafter som påverkar hur jordbruksmarkerna fungerar i kombination med hur de

40

olika grupperna av jordbrukare förvaltar sina landskap. För att förstå komplexiteten i de

kombinerade drivkrafterna i respektive område behövs mer tvärvetenskaplig forskning.

Den här avhandlingen bidrar med en fördjupad kunskap om den komplexa social-ekologiska

dynamiken som påverkar uppkomsten av ekosystemtjänster på gårds- och landskapsnivå, och

belyser betydelsen av att integrera kunskaper och perspektiv från olika grupper av aktörer. Genom

att kombinera olika metoder samt utveckla nya verktyg för att studera ekosystemtjänster bidrar

reslutaten i den här avhandlingen till en utveckling mot ett mer hållbart globalt jordbruk.

41

Isifingqo

ISintu sibhekene nezinqginamba eziningi zokuzikhiqizela ukudla okwanele ukondla inani labantu

elikhuphuka minyaka yonke, bebe beqikelelela ukungaqhubeki behlukumeza futhi bebulala

imvelo. Ukuguqulwa kwezinto zemvelo zenziwe imkhiqizo yezolimo kunikeze isintu amathuba

empucuzeko kanti futhi kuholele ekumoshekeni nasekugugulekeni komhlaba kanye nokufa

kwezilwanyazane ezibalulekile kwimvelo, lokhu kusongela ukukhiqizeka kwezinzuzo eziningi

zemvelo esincike kuzo. Izinzuzo zemvelo yizo esizithola ngokusebenzisa, ukunakekela kanye

nokuhlonipha imvelo. Lezizinzuzo zibamba elikhulu iqhaza ezimpilweni zethu, ikakhulukazi

ekudleni, amanzi okuphuza, ukuhlanza umoya kanye namanzi, okokubasa, okokwakha izindlu,

imisoco enhlabathini, izindawo zokungcebeleka kanye nokunye okuningi.

Ukuze sikwazi ukunakekela umhlaba wethu ngendlela ephephile futhi sikhiqize kuwo isikhathi

eside ngokugxila kwizinzuzo zemvelo, sidinga ukuqonda kabanzi ngendlela lezizinzuzo ezisabela

ngazo kwimpatho ehlukahlukene. Isibonelo salokhu kungaba ukushiya iziqaba ezinde phakathi

kwamasimu lapho izimila zemvelo zizozikhulela khona, lokhu kungandisa ukuphila ndawonye

kwezilwanyazane ezehlukene, kwehlise ukuguguleka komsoco wenhlabathi, kwandise

nezilwanyazane ezingabangani bemvelo, yize kuzonciphisa nendawo yokulima. Lokhu

kubandakanya nesidingo sokuqhamuka nezinsiza kusebenza ezikwazi ukuqinisekisa ubudlelwano

phakathi kwazo zonke izinzuzo zemvelo. Ngokwesibonelo ukubheka ukuthi yiziphi izinzuzo

ezikhona kanti futhi yiziphi esizidingayo. Enye yezingxenye ezibalulekile kucwaningo olubheka

impilonde wukuqokelela nolwazi lwabanye abantu abangayona ingxenye yezemfundo,

ngaleyondlela kubalulekile ukusebenzisa izindlela ezibandakanya wonke umuntu.

Lomqulu womphumela wocwaningo uqukethe izihloko ezijulile ezithinta ubudlelwane obukhona

phakathi kwemvelo kanye nokuphila, okuchaza izindlela eziningi ngokubaluleka kokuqiniswa

kobudlelwane phakathi kwemvelo nokuphila. Lomqulu uyinhlanganisela yezindlela

ezingasetshenziswa ukuhlolisisa ubume bezindawo ngenhloso yokuzigcina zisesimweni

esamukelekile ngokwemigomo yezemvelo, luphinde luhlanganise umhlahlandlela wezinsiza-

kwenza zokucwaninga ukwenzeka kwezinto ngokucoshela ulwazi lwabathintekayo.

Isigaba sokuqala socwaningo sigxile ekufundeni imibhalo ngezinzuzo zemvelo ukuze kwakheke

isithombe esibanzi, okutholakele kulokhukufundwa kwemibhalo ukuthi luncane kakhulu

ucwaningo oselwenziwe oluthinta lobudlelwano ezindaweni zasemakhaya kanye nezindawo

ezibekelwe ukulinywa. Isigaba sesibili sokufundwa kwemibhalo sigxile ekuhlaziyeni amathuba

okungenzeka abekhona kanye nezinselelo ezikhona ngaphansi komkhandlu weSifunda uThukela

iNingizumu Afrika. Lokhu kwenziwe ngokuqamba izigameko nokuyilapho abalimi,

nabacwaningi, nabamele izinhlangano ezizimele, kanye noMasipala bebambe iqhaza kucwaningo.

Umbhalo wesibili uqhathanise izindlela zokuhlonza kanye nokukhetha izihloko ezihamba

phambili kwezokuhlolwa kwezemvelo. Ukusetshenziswa kwezigameko kube nomphumela

wokubalulwa kwezihloko eziseqhulwini ngokuxoxisana nezinzululwazi endaweni yocwaningo.

42

Lendlela yokwenza isize kakhulu ukwakha nokuqinisa ubudlelwane nabalimi bendawo nokusiza

ukuqhubezela phambili izingxoxo nabathintekayo.

Isigaba sesithathu nesesine sihlanganise ukucwaninga uhwebelwano olukhona phakathi

kwezemvelo nenhlalo nokuqoqa ulwazi ezindaweni ezilinywayo. Kusona isigaba sesithathu

kusetshenziswe imibuzo-ngxoxo ejulile, ukudwetshwa kwebalazwe ngokuhlanganyela kanye

nokuxhumana nezinzululwazi ngaphansi komkhandlu wasoThukela. Kwisigaba sesine kugxilwe

ekucwaningeni ngokwenzeka eUppsala County eSweden. Zombili lezigaba zihlanganise abalimi

abasakhula kanye nalabo abahwebayo ngoba ulwazi nezimvo zabo zibalulekile kakhulu,

okutholakele ukuthi kukhona umehluko phakathi kwamaqembu abalimi ngokohwebelwano.

Esigabeni sesithathu kutholakale ukuthi kunokwehlukana ngolwazi lwemihlomulo etholakala

kwezemvelo ngokuhlukana kwamazinga abalimi. Abalimi abahwebayo/abakhulu bona

bayaqaphela indlela abasebenzisa ngayo umhlaba ukuze nabo ubabuyisele inzuzo. Kanti abalimi

abasakhula bona umkhiqizo wabo mncane, lokhu okudlondlobalisa ububha nokugcina sekudala

ingcindezi enkulu kumhlaba.

Ngokusebenzisa imiphumela evela esigabeni sesithathu kanye nesesine amazwe amabili

okucwaningwe kuwo, iNingizumu Afrika kanye neSweden angaqhathaniswa ngokwamaqoqo

ezinzuzo zemvelo akhiqizwe ngabalimi abancane basemakhaya kanye nabakhulu basemaplazini.

Loluqhathaniso lukhombise ukuthi lamaqoqo ezinzuzo zemvelo awehlukile kakhulu kubalimi

abakhulu. Abalimi abakhulu eNingizimu Afrika kanye naseSweden babanomkhiqizo omningi,

ukwehla kokuguguleka komsoco enhlabathini, banamanzi kanye nezokungcebeleka kodwa

bayaxega ngasekuhlonipheni amasiko. Abalimi abancane bona babanemikhiqhizo emincane

kodwa bakhombisa amazinga aphezulu okuhlonipha amasiko kuwo omabili amazwe, ngaphandle

kwalokhu okubalwe ngenhla amaqoqo ezinzuzo zemvelo zabo akhomba ukwahlukana okukhulu.

Lokwefana kanye nomehluko phakathi kwamazwe amabili aqhathaniswayo kuncike kwizindlela

zenhlalo kanye nemvelo okuyikona okunquma ukuthi umhlaba wokulima usetshenziswa kanjani

kubandakanya nokuziphatha kwalesosigaba sabalimi. Ukuze siqonde ngokuphelele ukuthi iziphi

izimbangela zemiphumela yalolucwaningo kundingeka olunye olunzulu olubandakanya izinhlaka

ezahlukene.

Lomqulu unikeza ulwazi olusha ekukhiqizweni kwezinzuzo zemvelo ngokwenhlalo uma

kubukelwa eduze njengaseplazini kanye nasemiphakathini. Lomqulu futhi uphinda ukhombise

ukubaluleka kokuhlanganisa ulwazi lwezinhlaka ezahlukene. Ngokuhlanganisa amasu

ahlukahlukene kanye nokuqhamuka nezindlela zokuqonda kangcono ukukhiqizwa

nokusetshenziswa kwezinzuzo zemvelo. Lomqulu uphonsa esivivaneni solwazi oludingekayo

ekulimeni nokonga imvelo.

43

Acknowledgements

‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ is a Zulu proverb which can be translated as ‘A person is a person

because of people’. This is the essence of Ubuntu, a Southern African ideology which guides you

in terms of how to relate to other people. Ubuntu is a philosophy of social relationships, building

on the belief that we are all profoundly connected. Without Ubuntu I would not have been able to

do this work. The people I want to thank are:

My supervisors Regina Lindborg and Line Gordon. Your great competencies and personalities

complement each other, and the combination of the two of you is synergistic! Thank you for

supporting my move to South Africa and continuing to guide and encourage me, even from 10 000

kilometres away. Thomas Elmqvist, I have you to thank for teaching me to be independent. You

sent me to Africa and gave me almost free reign! Graham Jewitt, thanks to you I have always had

a place to call my office. The support and generosity you have shown me over these years is

exceptional.

The farmers in Potshini, Okhombe, Bergville and Winterton. The periods I have spent in the field

have been tremendously encouraging and rewarding, with all the engaging talks and discussions

with you and your families. You have all enriched me as a person and as a scientist. An extra thank

you to the Dladla and Shezi families for accommodation and hospitality.

Johan Mwalimu Eklöf, you were the first to express your confidence in me, and convinced me to

continue my academic route. You brought me back to Systems Ecology, and without your

encouragement (forceful push) I wouldn’t have dared to jump on to this PhD train.

And what a journey! It turned out to be a long one, and a few workplaces have taken turns at being

my base over the years. Kräftan and Stockholm Resilience Centre: Matilda, it’s been 15 years now

(!) since we got lost in those bunkers during the cradle days of our academic careers. Sara, Erik,

Cibele, Emilie, Elin, Albert, Jerker, Magnus T, Björn, Lisen, Jacob, Stephan, Henrik, Maria T,

Johan E, Nanda, Emma, Oonsie, Hanna S, Hanna W, Vanessa, Maike, and the entire PhD-team

which I didn’t have the chance to get to know closely (but I know you are all awesome!). Cecilia,

Emina, Therese, Tanja, Hanna, Barbara and Siw, you made my life easier while I made your work

extra complicated. Thanks for putting up with me! My previous and current office mates at CWRR

and BEEH: Victor, Eva, Vincent, Michele, Sabine, Roland and Stefanie. Siphiwe, thanks for the

company all these late evenings in the office. And Cath, you left Pmb too soon (I know, too late)

but were still by my side until the end and beyond. CSIR and the Sweat shop: What amazing

hospitality and friendship from you guys, when I needed it the most! Belinda, Benis, Patrick, Nadia

and family, Linda, Ilse, Odi, Thozamile, Ryan and all the rest!

The times I have spent outside of the office, working or just hanging out with so many fabulous

teams and individuals, I have so many people to thank! Julia and Hanna in the early days. Erna,

44

Monique, Brigid, Michal, Sofi, and Kajsa. Rutger, not just a friend but also a much valued GIS

pro. Charmaine for your friendship, your knowledge on soil carbon, and for never getting tired of

explaining those soil variables to me. Farmer Support Group: Maxwell, Zanele, Nonhlanhla and

all the rest; especially Madondo and Malinga, without you my work in the field could not have

gone this smoothly. Your commitment, knowledge and facilitation skills amaze me. Most

memorable for me was the day when we arrived in the village to run a workshop, only to realize

that the community thought the workshop was scheduled for the next day. Without any sign of

distress, the two of you made some phone calls, went away briefly with the van, and within an

hour the hall was filled with participants, the lunch was being cooked in big pots in the yard and

the workshop turned out to be a great success.

I have always wondered which is the hardest: to be a PhD student or to be a parent. There is no

doubt that the combination of the two is not child’s play. Without the team of wonderful baby

sitters who have taken their turns I could not have done this, especially during my times in

Stockholm and Uppsala. Mamma, Malin, Daniel, Stina, Frida, PO, Sara, Klas, Birgitta and Berith,

your support has been priceless, and thanks to Tiko and Khanya who enjoyed being with you all.

To all my lovely and supportive friends, new and old! Bästa bönorna, Sara and Charlotta, I miss

you so! Thanks for upholding our friendship from such a distance. I think our chats are as long as

to the moon and back by now. Frida, it’s my turn now! Toscana is still waiting for you, and so am

I! Anette, I don’t know where to start. Thank you always for the ways you endlessly care for both

my inner and outer me. I have so much to thank you for!

Infinite love and appreciation to my families: Mamezala Petty, Mamkhulu Nana, Mzala Samkeh

and Sisi Thandeka. Your love and support is more than a daughter/sister/cousin in-law could ever

wish for. Thanks to all Malingas (Zindeeeela!) and Ndlovus.

Mamma Tinka! You are the best of mothers! Thank you for always showing interest in my work,

and giving me and my family endless support and enjoyment. The always loving and supporting

Flogsta team: My beloved brother Daniel, Stina Schw, Eja and Hugo. Tina, thanks for being you,

and for inspiring me with your creativity. Thank you to Lars-Åke and Veronica for having us every

summer! Thanks to all Henrikssons and Karlssons.

My children Fana, Afika, Ayathoba, Vuyiswa, Vuyani, Lungi, Bianca, Tiko, Tswa, Bhoyi and

Khanya. You have balanced my life to say the least. You all have lovely personalities with

unbelievable capabilities. Thank you for being you, and for being in my life.

Michael. You have taught me more than a thousand books could have taught me. I am forever

grateful for having you in my life. Not only did you bring children into my life, but you also

brought a huge loving family and never-ending adventures. If it wasn’t for you I would have

finished this thesis several years ago, and I have loved the extended journey. Thank you!

Finally, two stars who deserve an extra round of applause - actually a standing ovation: Mamma

and Mamezala, you are my true heroes!

Thank You – Tack – Ngiyabonga

45

Appendix

Methods for comparing ecosystem services bundles in the two case studies (papers III and IV) In order to be able to compare the generation of ecosystem services between different case studies,

the supply of each service was plotted in the flower diagrams, where each of the flower petals

represents one ecosystem service, and the area of the petal reads as the extent of the service supply,

in relation to the max value (figure 6). The original case studies used different methods, so for this

comparison I made the following adaptations:

1. In paper III, a single indicator was used to quantify each service, in two different land

uses (grazing land and crop land). This comparison analyses the landscapes as a whole,

thus the values for the services in each land use were averaged (regardless of the

proportions of crop land and grazing land), and normalised (figure 6:1).

2. In paper IV multiple indicators were used. Each indicator used for a service were

weighted equally for each service, and the average of the normalised values of the 1-4

indicators was calculated (figure 6:2). The indicators that only expressed demand for

services were removed (table S2 in paper IV).

3. Data and max values for figure 6:1 are found in figure 2 in paper III. Data for figure 6:2

are found in figure 2 in paper IV. The max values for figure 6:2 is the average of the

maximum indicator values.

.