Evidence of Similarities in Ecosystem Service Flow across the Rural-Urban Spectrum

Abstract

In 2006, the world’s population passed the threshold of being equally split between rural and urban areas. Since this point, urbanisation has continued, and the majority of the global population are now urban inhabitants. With this ongoing change, it is likely that the way people receive benefits from nature (ecosystem services; ES) has also evolved. Environmental theory suggests that rural residents depend directly on their local environment (conceptualised as green-loop systems), whereas urban residents have relatively indirect relationships with distant ecosystems (conceptualised as red-loop systems). Here, we evaluate this theory using survey data from >3000 households in and around Hyderabad, India. Controlling for other confounding socioeconomic variables, we investigate how flows of 10 ES vary across rural, peri-urban and urban areas. For most of the ES we investigated, we found no statistical differences in the levels of direct or indirect use of an ecosystem, the distance to the ecosystem, nor the quantities of ES used between rural and urban residents (p > 0.05). However, our results do show that urban people themselves often travel shorter distances than rural people to access most ES, likely because improved infrastructure in urban areas allows for the transport of ES from wider ecosystems to the locality of the beneficiaries’ place of residence. Thus, while we find some evidence to support red-loop–green-loop theory, we conclude that ES flows across the rural-urban spectrum may show more similarities than might be expected. As such, the impact of future urbanisation on ES flows may be limited, because many flows in both rural and urban areas have already undergone globalisation.

The Transformation of Rural Areas Located in China’s Agricultural Heritage Systems under the Evolution of Urban–Rural Relationships

“…The theoretical research on urban-rural relationships in the West displays a significant process from urban-rural connection [21], urban-rural binary opposition [22], to close urban-rural connection [23][24][25], whereas most Chinese urban and rural areas still exhibit typical dualistic characteristics currently [26,27]. The existence of urban-rural differences is recognized as an objective fact (e.g., in socio-ecological systems [28], road accessibility, the average age of the population, population growth rate [29], access to ecosystem services [30], income [31] and quality of life [32]). Du and Liu point out that the energy differences and functional complementarities between villages and urban areas shape the changing urban-rural relationships [33], and we agree with this view.…”

“…It is imperative to classify the stages of the urban-rural relationship, so as to gain insights into the patterns of changes in labor, land resources and industries at different urbanization stages (Figure 3). The empirical values of "stage theory" originating from much research in China, i.e., urbanization rates of 30%, 50% and 70% [21,30], were adopted in this paper, which separately complied with the stages of urban areas, namely, the beginning to take off, urban-rural uneven development, coordinated urban-rural development and integrated urban-rural development, suggesting the general urban-rural relationship under industrialization in China. Then, quantitative and qualitative analyses were combined in this paper to analyze the transformation of AHS rural areas from two aspects.…”

High Spatial-Temporal Resolution Data across Large Scales Are Needed to Transform Our Understanding of Ecosystem Services

“…However, different beneficiary groups, whilst socioeconomically disparate, sometimes show surprisingly similarity in ES demand. Welivita et al [30] provide evidence that beneficiaries in rural, peri-urban and urban areas in and around Hyderabad, India, seem to access ESs in similar ways. They show that beneficiaries across the rural-urban spectrum obtain comparable quantities of ESs with similar levels of direct/indirect access to equally distant ecosystems.…”

“…Finally, Dolan et al [34] break ES flow down into two concepts: nature to people (whereby nature moves towards the end-user), and people to nature (whereby the end-user moves towards the natural good). Applying this concept to Welivita et al [30] shows that urban people often travel shorter distances than rural people to access most ESs, likely because improved infrastructure in urban areas allows for the transport of ESs from wider ecosystems to the locality of the beneficiaries' place of residence. Dolan et al [34] highlight that existing movement theories from other disciplines might help ES scientists better understand how people travel to access nature on landscape scales.…”