Spatial uncoupling between ecosystem services and socio-ecological vulnerability.

NAHUELHUAL, LAURA; BARRAL, MARÍA PAULA; CARMONA, ALEJANDRA; LATERRA, PEDRO

San José de Costa Rica

Congreso; 7 Annual Conference Ecosystem services Partnership; 2014

Ecosystem Service Partnership

Maps of current ecosystem service (ES) flows are indiscriminately applied to a wide arrange of objectives, from the support of PES programs to land use planning for sustainable development. However, when conservation and/or restoration priorities are focused on the potential impact of land use trajectories on human wellbeing, maps of current ES flows are not necessarily the best decision tool.  In these cases, benefits from ES, their exposition and sensitivity to land use changes under different scenarios, as well as the social adaptive capacity to cope with these changes, offer complementary criteria to ES flows that can be advantageously integrated into maps of socio-ecological vulnerability (SEV). Here we explore to what extent ES and SEV maps differ, using two contrasting socioecological systems as study cases:   the Ancud County in the Chiloé archipelago in southern Chile and the Mar Chiquita Basin, at the Buenos Aires province of Argentina. We obtained both type of maps by applying a GIS modeling framework, ECOSER, by which ecosystem and landscape attributes were combined for mapping 12 ecosystem functions which in turn were integrated into five ES maps. Therefore, SEV maps were obtained by applying ECOSER to integrate the capture of benefits by direct and indirect beneficiaries, its exposure susceptibility and adaptive capacities into SEV.   Spatial clusters of ES and SEV values were also obtained and compared  through hotspot analysis.  Marked ES-SEV uncoupling was found within the landscape of both study cases, but it was arisen on different spatial relationships. While in the Mar Chiquita case,  hotspots of both clean water supply  and potential crop production coincide with the less vulnerable counties,  in the Ancud case, most vulnerable areas coincide with capture areas of the most important ecosystem service (clean water supply), matching partially with ES hotspots areas.  As a general conclusion, it may be stated that focus on  ES vs. socio-ecological vulnerability hotspots clearly lead to different conservation priorities, with different potential consequences on the dynamics of the socioecological system and on its  human wellbeing.