A key challenge of the Anthropocene is to advance human development
without undermining critical ecosystem services. Central to this challenge is a
better understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between biodiversity,
ecosystem services and human well-being, which interact in dynamic and
complex social-ecological systems. These relationships have been the focus of
much work in the past decades, however more remains to be done to
comprehensively identify and quantify them, especially at larger scales. In this
thesis, a social-ecological systems approach is adopted to investigate
connections between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being in
South Africa. The country’s high levels of biological and socio-economic
diversity, as well as its emerging economy make South Africa an interesting case
for exploring these connections.
Using data from a variety of public sources, and at different sub-national scales,
the thesis first identifies and analyses a variety of bundles of ecosystem service
use. Based on these bundles, three social-ecological system archetypes were
identified and mapped in South Africa, namely the green-loop (high overall use
of local ecosystem services), transition, and red-loop (low overall use of local
ecosystem services) systems. Further analysis explored the social and ecological
drivers of these patterns, and found the distribution of systems mainly
influenced by social factors including household income, gender of the
household head, and land tenure.
Second, this thesis uses human well-being indicators to construct, analyse and
map multi-dimensional human well-being bundles. These bundles were found
to spatially cluster across the landscape, and were analysed for congruence with
the ecosystem service use bundles. Discrepancies in the expected overlap of
ecosystem service use and human well-being were highlighted and concur with
findings elsewhere and the ongoing debate in the literature on the impacts of
time-lags, indicator choice and scale of these interactions.
Third, biodiversity in South Africa was analysed by employing an indicator of
biodiversity intactness (BII) at the population level. The BII was found to have
declined by 18.3% since pre-industrial times. Biodiversity loss was linked to the
potential supply of ecosystem services, as well as human well-being patterns. A 8
potential threshold at 40% biodiversity loss was detected, beyond which
population abundances decline sharply.
Finally, the thesis examines multiple perspectives on ecosystem services in
sustainability research, including the social-ecological systems perspective, and
discusses the complementarity of the different perspectives in furthering a
deeper understanding of the connections between people and ecosystems. The
social-ecological systems perspective employed throughout the empirical work
presented in this thesis contributed towards cross-cutting insights, the testing of
new kinds of data and the development of new approaches, all of which
represent important steps towards unravelling the connections between
biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, and contributing to the
key Anthropocene challenge of sustainable development.