Linking Cultural Ecosystem Services and Human Well-being
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Yen, Yu-Hua
Abstract
The huge benefits brought by ecosystems to the human society are referred to as ‘ecosystem services.’ As people have more ability to change nature, the impact of human beings on the ecosystem has increased and thus resulted in fewer benefits, which may affect human well-being. There has been rising attention to this issue. Currently, however, we have little understanding of ecosystem services, in particular that of the cultural ecosystem service and its relationships with human well-being. Therefore, research on the restoration of terraced paddies at Bayan Settlement in the Yangmingshan National Park is being conducted to explore the linkage between cultural ecosystem services and human well-being. The research is based on the Millennium Ecosystem Service Assessment in 2005. By means of literature reviews, field observation and interviews with local residents, the preliminary indicators of cultural ecosystem services of terraced paddies are established. The indicators are further modified and refined by experts of the field to form the final indicators, which are used in questionnaires of local residents to evaluate cultural ecosystem services. In this study, human well-being assessment indicators developed by previous research are also used in the other questionnaires to survey local residents. The results of both surveys are used to analyze the relations between cultural ecosystem services, (which are divided into three categories: aesthetics, leisure, and the sense of being local) and human well-being, (of which health and social relations are the two components) in order to establish the connections between them. The results show that the combination of opinions of both locals and experts helps to transform the cultural ecosystem services, which are quite subjective and abstract, into practical indicators for quantification. The consequences of the questionnaire demonstrate that the indicators developed by this study are of good credibility. Among them, we find that aspects of sense of place and leisure get higher scores, while that of aesthetics gets a lower score due to different means of livelihood of local people. The consequences of the evaluation of human well-being show that local residents are very satisfied with their lives. However, social relations alone are affected by the different interactions between local residents. The evaluation of social relations gets a lower score and indicates larger changes. Finally, concerning the connections between cultural ecosystem services and human well-being, aesthetics is slightly correlated with health, sense of place is moderately correlated with health and social relations, and leisure shows a slight correlation with health. At the same time, we also find that aesthetics and leisure are more correlated with local people’s physical than with their mental health.
Subjects
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
Cultural Ecosystem Services
Human Well-being
Bayan
Terraced Paddy
Yangmingshan National Park
SDGs
Type
thesis
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